Abstract
Diane Comer’s The Braided River provides a series of testimonies and accounts of the lived experiences of immigrants, and reflects on the nature of migration, the conditions for its possibility, and the evolving contemporary world that produces transnational subjects. Drawing on the personal essays of 37 writers working under Comer’s instruction in a community education course, this multivocal text weaves the experiences of migrant lives into broader ruminations on global mobility and transnational resettlement. Presenting these stories in conversation with everyone from Tolstoy to Homi Bhabha, Comer’s work stresses “the emotional and existential landscape of migration,” conveying a much-needed account of what it means to move across cultural, linguistic, and racial borders (239).
Comer begins her reflection on the relation between migration and personal writing by recounting her own history of moving across borders and inhabiting multiple nation-states. As a self-proclaimed “military nomad” teaching in New Zealand, Comer’s encounter with a cohort of students, who are also predominantly migrants, leads to a rich inquiry into the realities of living abroad (33). Together, these writers question how conceptions of home and self are bound up in the transitory experience of migration, examining themes of memory, identity, consciousness, and the peculiar act of rendering the self that emerges in the personal essay. Gorgeously written in clear and concise prose, this work reflects on home and self in its connection to past and present, old and new, and the many vagaries that come to define migratory life.
In the first half of the book, Comer ruminates on the initial impacts of departure, the deep and singular sense of loss that characterizes leaving one’s home, and the strangeness of living in new and familiar places. In Chapters 1–3, she traces patterns of reflection on the sense of self and its reliance on familiar landscapes and communities and how, when lost, this rupture creates a deep and singular sense of being out of tune with the world migrants come to inhabit. Viewing these questions in relation to writing as an act of re-ordering the migratory self, Comer notes how the personal essay unifies migrant subjectivity across borders and comes to inhabit being out of place as a condition of being at home.
While the first half of the book examines themes of departure, the second half looks closely at resettlement. Framed in a story of Comer’s failed attempt at resettlement in Sweden, where loss of language and cultural incompatibility lead to her eventual return to New Zealand, Chapters 3–6 describe what happens when migrants are unable to build roots in certain, less receptive environments and how some distances can be insurmountable. Continuing to invoke the experience of multiple migrant writers assembled in this text, later chapters explore themes of belonging/non-belonging, return and non-return, reception and rejection of immigrants, and how some host cultures are more or less open to newcomers.
The Braided River presents valuable insights into the lived experience of migration, the other side of what one might encounter in policy, scholarly literature, and similar official accounts of human mobility. However, Comer tends to conflate emigres, exiles, multinational subjects, and displaced persons, and thus characterizes any kind of human mobility as migration, despite vast differences between those who sojourn and those who flee (18). Differences in global mobility, and the significance of those differences, are briefly mentioned in this text but remain largely unexplored in ways that fail to fully represent the contemporary nature of migration and the socioeconomic and geopolitical forces which shape it. Moments of reference, for instance, to traveling doctors and international students as “displaced” create the impression that cross-national movement is undifferentiated by class, race, and citizenships status (58). Despite a brief disclaimer in recognition of these differences, again, Comer’s text misses the opportunity to surface and interrogate profound differences in global mobility and enclosure (18).
While the nature of migration is far more variegated and concrete than Comer’s sympathetic and brilliantly multivocal reading suggests, her focus on the lived experience of migration and its rendering through the personal essay presents a much-needed sense of the persons behind the global flow of bodies, making this is an excellent text for anyone interested in the topic of migration, broadly construed. It is also, and importantly, conversant with specialized discourse on contemporary migration, making this an excellent resource for formal studies and research on immigration. By focusing on the experiences of voluntary and upwardly mobile emigres, however, and on those traveling under the auspices of the nation-state, this text invites additional scholarship on the lived experiences of those who cross borders under conditions of fugitivity and trespass.