Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabes, Lubin and Luca: No Man's Language by Greg Kerr

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabes, Lubin and Luca: No Man's Language by Greg Kerr Emma Wagstaff Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabes, Lubin and Luca: No Man's Language. By Greg Kerr. (Comparative Literature and Culture) London: UCL Press. 2021. x+193 pp. £40 (pbk £20; ebk Open Access). ISBN 978–1–78735–675–7 (pbk 978–1–78735–673–3; ebk 978–1–78735–676–4). In this clear and engaging open-access book, Greg Kerr brings together four major poets writing in French from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Each poet displays an uneasy relationship to French and to language more broadly. In different ways, their work investigates what happens when the writing subject does not belong, and Kerr shows how a sense of exile operates on a formal level in the texts as well as thematically. In the chapter on Armen Lubin, the pseudonym adopted by Armenian writer Chahnour Kerestedijan on his emigration to France following the Armenian genocide, Kerr explores the link between exile and illness. Texts by Lubin reveal that the invalid is deprived of agency and dehumanized. That uncertainty extends to the poet's own status, not only as a writer, but also as a resident of France unable to apply for naturalization because his illness prevented him from signing up for military service. Kerr's discussion of Edmond Jabès, who was exiled to France following the Suez crisis, takes in abstraction, silence, the proscription of images linked to diasporic Judaism, and space on the page. Not only does Jabès bear witness to absence and to silence, but, Kerr argues, he inscribes silence and hesitation visually in the fragmented spatial layout of some texts, frustrating any attempt by the reader to locate an origin within them. Ghérasim Luca, born Salman Locker, was a Romanian writer of Jewish origins who lived in permanent exile in France from [End Page 501] 1952. His texts reject monolingualism while retaining an outsider's relationship to language. Luca's experience of the Shoah, along with the influence of Romanian Surrealism and psychoanalysis, contributes to a 'stammering' (p. 116) in his texts. Subsequently, his anti-rationalist writing enacts a 'weakening' (p. 137) of language and moves towards a state that is not so much multilingual as post-monolingual. Although younger than the other poets discussed and not a migrant, Michelle Grangaud also displays the relationship of an outsider to language. Kerr argues that she subverts apparently stable categories, including proper nouns, through techniques such as the anagram, which 'cuts through the substance of language' (p. 158). Her work is not anti-poetic, but the poetry lies in the relations between words rather than in any creative originality of the person writing. The main strength of Kerr's book lies in its sensitivity to the texts. Biographical readings are employed as appropriate for a work on exile and statelessness, but the texts take centre stage throughout, both in detailed textual analysis and in the tracing of developments in a poet's oeuvre. Kerr conducts illuminating close readings of whole poems, and provides English translations that not only make his book accessible to a wider readership but also act as readings in themselves. He pays attention to sense—and to the resistance to meaning—at the level of phonemes and pictorial elements as well as words, lines, and complete texts, and his readings are entirely convincing while remaining focused on the overall theme of non-belonging. Kerr deftly brings together poetic and philosophical reflections on exile, the rejection of monolingualism, the uncertainty suffered by individuals deprived of citizenship, and what it is like to experience language as an outsider. He draws on the work of other critics who examine statelessness in poetry, such as Michael G. Kelly, and situates his book in relation to current debates in poetry involving major thinkers, including Michel Deguy, Jacques Rancière, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Kerr shows how the poets he discusses critique 'paradigms of possession or appropriation' (p. 187) by enacting radical non-belonging. His book therefore not only offers valuable insight into four significant poets, but also makes an important contribution...