Imaginary Homelands Research Articles

Imaginary Homelands. Rappresentazioni incrociate di Oriente e Occidente nella letteratura di viaggio contemporanea

Since the time of Herodotus’ Historiai, travel writing as a literary genre has been marked by an unspoken premise: Westerners would be the observing travellers, while Orientals or Easterners, on the contrary, the observed natives. Focusing on the recent development of an opposite «counter-travel writing» by extra-European authors who live in the West and face its contradictions, this essay defines the historical and literary changes that have overturned this paradigm. Caught between two cultures, two languages, and two nations, authors such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Suketu Mehta, have profoundly reshaped the representation of the cultural encounter between the West and the East. If “nation” consists in its “narration”, as Homi Bhabha puts it, the same concept of homeland loses its geographical roots and opens itself to the endless contaminations of a global world. West and East thus become “imaginary homelands”: ideal spaces for the renegotiation of cultures and identities which need always to be rethought, retold, and re-imagined.

THE MEMORIALIZATION OF GHALLUGHARA: TRAUMA, NATION AND DIASPORA

The storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984 is central to the imagination of both a Sikh ‘nation’ and a specifically Sikh ‘diaspora’. Both ‘derivative discourses’ construct Sikhs as ‘victims’ of a ghallughara which forced them into a physical or emotional exile from India. Translated as ‘genocide’, the term ghallughara resonates deeply with earlier pogroms in Sikh history, and is memorialized through the image of the desecrated Akal Takht. Mediated through Information and Communications Technologies, this on-line lieux de mémoire provides testimony to the attempt by the ‘secular’ Indian state to violently wrench the temporal from the spiritual dimensions of Sikh sovereignty as embodied in the Khalsa, thus leaving Sikhs ‘mute and absolutely alone’ in a world of nation-states. In contrast to the nationalist imaginary, it is suggested that Sikh claims to sovereignty should be grounded not in territorial claims to an imagined homeland of Khalistan, but in a reconceptualization of the Khalsa as a distinct de-territorialized religio-political community, one better able to articulate the universal values of the Gurus in an increasingly ‘post-western’ world.

Not Your Typical ‘Diaspora’ or ‘Third World Cosmopolitan’

What is one to do with international fictions informed by an identity culture that involves extreme global mobility, but does not involve third world roots? This article seeks to address how one ca...

Indigeneity in the Diaspora: The Case of Native Hawaiians at Iosepa, Utah

The literature on indigenous immigrants in the diaspora tends to focus on their continued relationship to the homeland focusing in part on generational issues that emerge when subsequent generations, born in the "host" country, makes sense of their connection to an imagined homeland. My investigation of a Polynesian Mormon community at Iosepa, Utah asks how Native Hawaiians maintain our indigeneity not only in relationship to home, Hawai'i, but also to the native peoples upon whose lands we dwell, the Skull Valley Goshutes. When the analytical gaze shifts from the homeland to alternative contact narratives, we must recalibrate the way we see and understand how settler-colonialism is articulated with indigeneity. What responsibilities do diasporic indigenous people have to the indigenous people upon whose land they now occupy? The example of two waves of Mormon Polynesian migration to Utah, which occurred a century apart, offers an evocative case for interrogating these linkages.

Engaging the Canadian Diaspora: Youth social identities in a Canadian border city1

This paper is based on qualitative interviews undertaken with immigrant youth of African descent in Windsor, Ontario; it describes their sojourner lives across geographic borders and their final settlement in Windsor. The paper also offers narrations of the activities that enabled them to formulate friendships and the barriers and facilitators to the development of friendships across races. Critical findings reported in this paper reveal the ways that youth use resources in their travels to construct and negotiate their identities and to formulate new friendships. An important resource used by the majority of the youth was that of an imagined homeland, which consequently impacted on how they viewed and acted on the racial boundary critical in the formation of friendships in the Diaspora.

Where Does "Diaspora" Belong?: The View from Greek American Studies

Diaspora, variously defined, denotes difference within a host nation and connection with a real or imaginary homeland elsewhere. Diaspora claims, that is, a location that entangles the national, otherness within the national (often construed as ethnic), and places across national borders, all this in vastly complex ways. The study of diaspora therefore requires an analogous scholarly location that brings into conversation national, ethnic, and area studies. The analysis of the U.S. "Greek diaspora," for instance, calls for cross-fertilization between American ethnic, Greek American, and modern Greek studies. This kind of systematic exchange did not materialize in the context of post 1960s U.S. academy, despite vocal calls for such dialogue. Here I demonstrate that "diaspora" was not a primary organizing reference for research in either U.S. Greek American or U.S. modern Greek studies, a lapse all too conspicuous if one takes into account the political, economic, and cultural importance of the Greek diaspora. Instead, dominant threads within Greek American and modern Greek studies developed along the trajectory of a nation-centric paradigm respectively, the former privileging the study of ethnicity in a national (American) context, the latter attaching analytical priority to Greece. As a result of this bifurcation "diaspora" was relegated to the margins, remained under-theorized, and was often neglected as a research prospect. From the perspective of Greek American studies and focusing on selective Greek American histories, texts, and institutional contexts, it is possible to illuminate the ideological underpinnings for turning diaspora into a contested terrain for both Greek American and modern Greek studies. Thus, the clashing positions can be charted against the ongoing transnationalization of Greek worlds as well as of the transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, a parallel development that invites a fundamental remapping of Greek America and consequently obliges scholars of both Greek American and modern Greek studies to rethink their spatial and cultural frames of analysis. The operation of transnational geographies associated with Greek worlds calls attention to the artificiality of the boundary between Greek American and modern Greek studies and the necessity for joining their forces for the purpose of new critical mappings, a project now under way within U.S. modern Greek studies programs.

O escritor migrante e a ficção diaspórica

In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie says that migrant writers, who belong to different worlds and have been transported through the world, are translated men. A hybrid man is in the confluence of blending, changes and in the combination of new cultures, ideas and policies. Thus, he is a man that cannot think of himself as being the product of an identity that is conditioned to what Mar Augé defined as “anthropological place”. This article focuses on the novel Fury, by Salman Rushdie, in order to show how it portrays the issue of identity from the migrant writer’s viewpoint.

Metaphors of Diaspora: English Literature at the Turn of the Century

The purpose of this essay is to make a literary reading of the postcolonial diasporas in Britain, especially in connection with the metaphors used by diasporic writers in the UK in their search for their own identity and belonging. As diaspora is a metaphorical term in the sense we are using it now, three different metaphorical constructions of diaspora will be explored: a) the metaphor of the imaginary homelands created by immigrant writers; b) the metaphor of the Black Atlantic as a sort of space shared by those who are part of the diaspora and what this entails in history and literature; and c) the metaphor of the journey as an intrinsic element of diaspora itself.

Religious Identity, Territory, and Partition: India And its Muslim Diaspora in Surinam and the Netherlands

This article relates the Indian Muslim diaspora to the events of 1947, when British India was partitioned. It is argued that although the government of India has tried to woo people of Indian origin, it is interested only in Hindus, while reterritorializing Muslims to Pakistan. It is also argued that, as a consequence, Muslims of Indian origin in Surinam and the Netherlands do not identify with present-day India. Nor, however, do they look upon Pakistan as their homeland. Instead, they have chosen “Hindustan”—pre-partitioned British India—as their imaginary homeland. Although it was lost with Partition, they retain a collective memory of Hindustan and try to restore it in Surinam and the Netherlands.

Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora

Culinary practices situate themselves at most rudimentary level, at most necessary and most unrespected level. Luce Giard, Nourishing Arts, (156) 'The diaspora women who thought Culture meant being able to create a perfect mango chutney in New Jersey were scorned by visiting scholar from Bombay--who was also a woman but unmarried and so different. --Sujata Bhatt, Chutney (29) Behind assiduous documentation and defense of authentic lies an unarticulated anxiety of losing subject. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity (10) In Food and Belonging: At 'Home' in 'Alien-Kitchens,' Indian American cultural critic Ketu Katrak suggests that culinary narratives, suffused with nostalgia, often manage immigrant memories and imagined returns to homeland. Narrativizing her own migratory journey from Bombay to United States, she remarks, own memorybanks about food overflowed only after I left India to come to United States as a graduate student. The disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection with home. I longed for my native food as I dealt with my dislocation from throbbing Bombay metropolis (270). As an immigrant subject distanced geographically and temporally from her childhood home in Bombay, food becomes both intellectual and emotional anchor. Psychically food transports Katrak to her childhood home, giving her a sense of rootedness when she immigrates to United States. And yet, she also acknowledges how experience of dislocation, modulated by a nostalgic longing for familiar, is also deeply rooted in creation of imaginary fictions which distort lived realities of her prior life. She notes: food was not pleasurable to me as a child. Thinking about this now as an adult, I can say that food was an overdetermined category for me in my childhood years; it tasted of heady tropical environment, it delineated who was in and out of favor with my father. I tasted anxiety in onions fried a bit too brown and tension in too many dark burned spots on roasted papad. One never knew what would be considered faulty at a particular meal, and uncertainty overwhelmed any pleasure in what was eaten. (266-67) Katrak's honesty registers affective value of food and smells, in process reflecting nostalgia structuring memories of home for immigrant subject. Recalling Salman Rushdie's take on nostalgia and historical memory in his now classic essay, Imaginary Homelands, she cautions against a tendency to transform nostalgia for ineffable into an idealization of past. In Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie sets in motion a complex investigation into condition of diasporic exilic writer. As he so eloquently puts it, It may be that when Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost (9). Seeing past through shards of a mirror inevitably distorts idealized memory one has of a homeland: owing to exigencies of displacement and dislocation certain memories are remembered, while others, literally, are re-membered. As Rushdie moves us through problem of memory and mimetic fidelity, he tells a story about returning to India after an absence of many years. He draws an analogy between an old black-and-white photograph of his childhood home taken prior to his birth and his perceptions of his childhood. With passage of time and movement to different spaces, the colours of history had seeped out of my mind's eye (9): nostalgia intervenes to colorize, or, in this case, decolorize past, reducing it to a pale imitation of what it might have been in mind's eye. I begin with this brief but necessary trail through these two essays to highlight how nostalgia is always already predetermined indeed over determined--in scripting immigrant attachment to past. …

Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic; Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative; What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers

Book Review| September 01 2007 Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic; Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative; What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers Michelle A. Stephens Michelle A. Stephens Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (3): 623–625. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-029 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michelle A. Stephens; Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic; Reworlding America: Myth, History, and Narrative; What Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands in Novels by Caribbean Writers. American Literature 1 September 2007; 79 (3): 623–625. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2007-029 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Rose Quong becomes Chinese: An Australian in London and New York

The story of Rose Quong (1879–1972) reveals how an Australian learned to use the pervasive Orientalism of the early twentieth century to her own ends. Quong claimed an essential ability to interpret Chinese culture, forging a career out of lecturing and writing on Chinese literature and traditions, and performing her own Chineseness. She juggled her mixed Australian, British and Chinese heritage in both London and New York, showing the plasticity and transportability of ethnic identities. Quong's story points to the role of London as imperial metropolis in the staging of an Australian's transnational career, even for an Australian whose imaginary homeland was China. The fact that Quong was embraced by the Australian community in London adds a new perspective on White Australia, even though that community was instrumental in steering her towards Chineseness and Orientalism.

Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness

The U.S. state of Vermont is often portrayed as a place where “race” is of little significance, yet notions of whiteness are central to how the state has been represented and represents itself. A critical analysis of historical and contemporary economies of representation examines how Vermont has been imagined as one of the last remaining spaces of authentic Yankee whiteness while more recently becoming an imagined homeland for particular brands of white liberal politics and social practice in the United States. Narratives of white Vermont identity have often explicitly drawn on oppositions to other forms of whiteness, particularly those associated with the U.S. South, in constructing an image of a comparatively racially benign Yankee whiteness. Recent right-wing discourses have explicitly attempted to construct Vermont whiteness as outside the American mainstream (not least through its discursive association with gay and lesbian sexualities), suggesting a need for geographical work on the (re)configuration of whiteness to reconsider where “normal” American whiteness is imagined to reside. The examination of the case of Vermont highlights the need for future geographical research to attend to continuities between various territorialized constructions of whiteness as well as contestations within whiteness.

An Australian Diaspora?

ABSTRACTAlthough Australia is best known as a country of immigration, around 1 million Australians currently live outside of their homeland on a permanent or long‐term basis. The present paper uses a number of quantitative and qualitative data sources to assess the extent to which Australia's expatriate community fulfils the four defining criteria of contemporary diasporas advanced by Butler (2001). These criteria include involving a scattering of two or more destinations, a relationship with an actual or imagined homeland, common group identity shared among diaspora communities, and existence over at least two generations. It finds that the Australian expatriate community qualifies on the basis of at least three of those criteria. The article then examines some dimensions of the relationship between the Australian diaspora with their homeland. It is argued that Australia's diaspora constitutes a meaningful and distinctive group and represents an important subject of serious study. Indeed, it is a significant but neglected part of Australia's demography and population geographies. This was reflected in the Australian Senate setting up an Inquiry into the Australian expatriate community in 2003.

'The East is Where Things Begin': Writing the Ancestral Homeland in Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston

Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston engage with the dialectic of Chinese-American identity through processes of cultural self-empowerment, yet also undermine such work through self-orientalizing tendencies within their writing. In Kingston's early work and throughout Tan's oeuvre, China is repeatedly figured as an imaginary homeland replete with recurrent, often negative, stereotypes. Such treatment recalls Edward Said's classic formulations of orientalism, particularly when these writers deploy ‘haunting memories’ and ‘remarkable experiences’ of the ancestral homeland. Their narrative strategies – in which China is so often privileged over America – call into question both authors’ insistence that they be considered as pre-eminently American writers. Moreover, their texts by no means represent the inevitable method of negotiating Chinese diasporic identities, as demonstrated by the work of Gish Jen and Timothy Mo, for example. While a substantial body of secondary literature exploring the work of Tan and Kingston exists, a sustained critique of the self-orientalizing inclinations of both writers in conjunction is missing. This forms the point of departure for this article, which attempts a fuller understanding of the texts in question by interrogating the trope of imagined Chinese homeland and the self-orientalizing literary techniques through which it finds expression.

Imaginary Homelands in Jamaica Kincaid's Narratives of Development

Imaginary Homelands in Jamaica Kincaid's Narratives of Development

Imagined and imaginary whales: George Orwell, benedict Anderson and Salman Rushdie

George Orwell, anticipating many of the arguments made by Benedict Anderson in the “Patriotism and Racism” chapter of Imagined Communities, illuminated patriotism and nationalism as shifting aspects of a wider dialectical interplay between an identification with imagined communities and a loyalty to humanity. Orwell's essay “Inside the Whale” can be seen, contrary to Salman Rushdie's criticism that it advocates quietism, as an essay about imaginary homelands. In this reading the whale is a metaphor for a dialectical space created by a writer in order to gain purchase on the unceasing dialectic of history. Analysis of The Lion and the Unicorn in this article links Orwell's work with that of Anderson and Rushdie by exploring in his vision of a classless England the relationship between the personal imaginary homeland and the political imagined community.

Mother imagery in the novels of Afro-Caribbean women

Focusing on specific texts by Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Conde, and Paule Marshall, this fascinating study explores the intricate trichotomous relationship between the mother (biological or surrogate), the motherlands Africa and the Caribbean, and the mothercountry represented by England, France, and/or North America. The mother-daughter relationships in the works discussed address the complex, conflicting notions of motherhood that exist within this trichotomy. Although mothering is usually socialized as a welcoming, nurturing notion, Alexander argues that alongside this nurturing notion there exists much conflict. Specifically, she argues that the mother-daughter relationship, plagued with ambivalence, is often further conflicted by colonialism or colonial intervention from the other, the colonial mothercountry.Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women offers an overview of Caribbean women's writings from the 1990s, focusing on the personal relationships these three authors have had with their mothers and/or motherlands to highlight links, despite social, cultural, geographical, and political differences, among Afro-Caribbean women and their writings. Alexander traces acts of resistance, which facilitate the (re)writing/righting of the literary canon and the conception of a newly created genre and a womanist tradition through fictional narratives with autobiographical components.Exploring the complex and ambiguous mother-daughter relationship, she examines the connection between the mother and the mother's land. In addition, Alexander addresses the ways in which the absence of a mother can send an individual on a desperate quest for selfhood and a home space. This quest forces and forges the creation of an imagined homeland and the re-validation of ways and cultures preserved by the mother. Creating such an imagined homeland enables the individual to acquire wholeness, which permits a spiritual return to the motherland, Africa via the Caribbean. This spiritual return or homecoming, through the living and practicing of the old culture, makes possible the acceptance and celebration of the mother's land.Alexander concludes that the mothers created by these authors are the source of diasporic connections and continuities. Writing/righting black women's histories as Kincaid, Conde, and Marshall have done provides a clearing, a space, a mother's land, for black women. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women will be of great interest to all teachers and students of women's studies, African American studies, Caribbean literature, and diasporic literatures.

Epic of Failure: Disappointment as Utopian Fantasy in Midnight’s Children

And so, by strange and melancholy paradox, moment of failure is moment of value; comprehending and experiencing of life's refusals is source from which fullness of life seems to flow, What is depicted [in novel] is total absence of any fulfillment of meaning, yet work contains rich and rounded fullness of true totality of Georg Lukacs (126) What I tried to do was to set up tension in [Midnight's Children], paradoxical opposition between and content of narrative. The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But story is told in manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why narrative constantly throws up new stories, why teems. The form--multitudinous, hinting at infinite possibilities of country--is optimistic counterweight to Saleem's personal tragedy. Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands 16) Ever since Salman Rushdie described Indian longing for form in his novel Midnight's Children (359), questions of have been central topic for Rushdie scholarship. Form, or, to use slightly more specific term, genre, is so central because addresses both aesthetics and politics; indeed, represents crucial intersection between two. As Tzvetan Todorov and M. M. Bakhtin teach us, genre is less matter of taxonomy than of how we give meaning to stories, events, and actions that occur in literature and everyday (1) Ideological conflicts are played out in literature, and literary scholars keep returning to Midnight's Children because defies efforts to determine what might be most appropriate to depict history of postindependence India. The problem lies in essential ambiguity of Midnight's Children: should literature even try to satisfy longing for form? This epic longing, for Rushdie, represents dangerous desire for consistency, coherence, and meaning that can efface cultural diversity of Indian peoples and lead readers to be complacent in face of history of sectarian violence and governmental betrayal. Yet Rushdie himself composes work that self-consciously asserts its own epic status. The narrator, Saleem Sinai, reconciles this apparent contradiction by conceding that longing for form is inescapable: Form--once again, recurrence and shape!--no escape from it (524). At same time, he composes history that he foresees to be threat as much as comfort, story waiting to be unleashed upon amnesiac nation (549).The story of intertwined destinies of Saleem and India asserts that failures of Indian nationalism are appropriate subject material for true epic of nat ion. To extent that Rushdie answers national longing for form, then, he does so by creating an epic of failure. Although Rushdie scholarship has frequently condemned him for his pessimism, there are theories that associate failure with insight and discovery. Georg Lukacs, for example, asserts that moment of failure in novel is the moment of value (126). By drawing attention to its own inability to achieve aesthetic totality of epic, novel can convey a true totality of life. Bakhtin makes similar case, arguing that novel's failure to maintain monologic and authoritative voice of epic makes possible to convey heteroglossia that characterizes everyday life, Thus, novel's supposed failure of representation makes possible to perceive world in terms of its multiplicity, not homogeneity. Lukacs and Bakhtin both claim that this formal or generic failure is novel's defining feature and key to understanding its potential contribution to politics. (2) Drawing upon their claim that aesthetic forms imply particular political values, I will suggest that Midnight's Children can be read as an effort to imagine more egalitarian India through depicting personal tragedy of Saleem Sinai. …

Bouncing Down to the Underworld: Classical Katabasis in The Ground Beneath Her Feet

In an essay on Italo Calvino, Rushdie writes that perhaps the most dominant characteristic of Calvino's entire output is protean, metamorphic genius for never doing the same thing twice (Imaginary Homelands 254). One might say that Rushdie has a protean, metamorphic genius for doing the same thing twice. Herein lies the difference between two types of storytellers: the metabasist and the katabasist. Katabasis is the ancient Greek term for journeying down into the underworld. A katabasist, one who writes about underworld descents, also characteristically employs the narrative structure of a journey to look inward, downward, and back. So one may posit the neologism of metabasist for a writer who never looks down and rarely looks back, having got things precisely, economically right the first time round. Thus, while Calvino the metabasist breaks new ground with every work, Rushdie the katabasist repeatedly mines the same site--the ground beneath, rather than the ground ahead--for different discoveries. One of Rushdie's central preoccupations, explored in each of his fictions to date, is finding the appropriate novel form to express the of an immigrant or emigrant in modern times. Fletcher, for example, notes Rushdie's exploration of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile (2). This preoccupation is nowhere more evident than in his recent novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Here, as in previous fiction, Rushdie exposes the inadequacy of the concept of a line, either as a way of understanding lived experience or as a way of structuring narrative. Rai, his first-person narrator, explicitly rejects simple linearity in recounting the story of Ormus, Vina, and himself: Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumbling apart. (543) Rai points to the inadequacy not only of traditional linear narrative but also of postmodernist disjunctions and Borgesian forked paths. But his own description of life's eternal bounciness seems to me much more gaily Rabelaisian than is the novel as a whole. Quite apart from bumping together and tumbling apart, Rushdie's troupe of caricatures also knock out each other's brains with cricket balls, suffocate each other with pillows, and blow each other up. My own impression of the felt shape of a human in The Ground Beneath Her Feet is of a sequence of explosions and implosions, of expansions into the world and contractions into the self, which gradually acquire the diastolic-systolic momentum of a heartbeat. Explosions and implosions The preoccupation with this shape of a human life is, I think, entirely consistent with the concerns explored in Rushdie's earlier fiction. The lines of continuity deserve some emphasis, I think, particularly in light of the mixed reviews that greeted the novel's publication in 1999. (1) But none of these assessments really responds to the way this novel repeats, elaborates, and extends Rushdie's earlier representations of explosive and implosive life shapes. An aerial survey of Rushdie's various fictional cosmoi would, I think, lead us to conclude that human life is something strung out between two destructive energies: bomb and whirlpool. On the one hand, we re always in danger of fragmentation, of having our inner selves blown apart; on the other hand, something is always circling round us, waiting to suck us down into oblivion. These two forces, the Scyllae and Charybdes of Rushdie's Mediterranean, haunt the precarious lives of his protagonists. In Haroon and the Sea of Stories, poisonously bad narratives clog the pure streams of the Ocean of Stories and threaten to choke life out of the Ocean altogether. …