The Abject Swearing at the Figure of the Stranger

Abstract

In this autoethnographic poetry, I express my sense of Ulysses syndrome, reflecting upon the past 12 years since I left my motherland—China. In reading Ahmed’s work, the human “I” is conceptualized as the “the stranger,” reminiscent of the foreignness of the past, longing for an imagined life that he would live in. Yet, Kristeva’s pathologizing label of abjection horrifies its own existence of the human “I,” who cannot remember its youth and beauty, becoming an embodied Other. In his dreams, the abject “I” utters flights of poetry at the stranger by asking—how migration can be experienced as anything other than complication with all the mess, tension, and conflict it brings. In bringing the concept of abjection, it problematizes my understanding of be(com)ing the “figure of the stranger,” transforming the humanness that the human “I” represents in its wake.