"The voice in C. The Creole Attitude of a Bangladeshi Refugee in Italy"

CHAPTER FOUR

THE VOICE IN C. THE CREOLE ATTITUDE OF A BANGLADESHI

REFUGEE IN ITALY

STEFANO JACOVIELLO AND TOMMASO SBRICCOLI

Dialogue precedes language and generates it —J. M. Lotman (1984: 68).1

1. Introduction

C is sitting in front of us under a leafy oak tree in the farmhouse garden of a small village in southern Tuscany. He has invited us to a party organised by a German lady who has been living here for the last twenty years with her daughter, borne from her relationship with a Turkish man. She runs a cultural association that organises Italian language courses for foreigners. This is how C has come to meet her. Even if we are on the top of Maremma hills, in the very heart of “traditional” Tuscany, the party is an extremely cosmopolitan one, with people from all over Europe and Italy, including locals as well.

For most of the morning, we have been talking with C about the problems he faces in getting his fiancé to join him in Italy. As a refugee, he is actually unable to go back to his country of origin, Bangladesh, to marry her. At the same time, as a Hindu he is not able to arrange a “proxy marriage”, as Muslims could. Caught between the typical migrant desire to build a new life in the new country where he now lives and the difficulties in overcoming legal and bureaucratic bottlenecks, he asked us for advices and support. Before lunchtime, he wavered between treating us to a pizza at a restaurant in his small town and bringing us to the party, where we would have the chance to meet some of his new friends. In both cases, he

1 All translations are the authors’ own.

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would have played the role of host, introducing us to his new life. He opted for the latter, and we are now enjoying the pleasant countryside air, finishing the interview with C as lunch is prepared. He tells us about his imprisonment in a Libyan jail, where he pretended to be Muslim among the other convicts, until his incapacity to pray properly and the accompanying risk of being unmasked led him to join a group of Christian “Africans”, who then baptised him. As we wonder about this strange event, at the end of the story C sees a friend setting a table nearby and yells to him, “Do you know I’m Christian like you all? I have been baptised! So I am Christian!”

Suddenly, we and all the unknown people at the party find ourselves grouped together as members of the same community and category, of which C is, so to say, the “founder”. Our position within the party is reconfigured, and so are our relations to others. We are all Christians, just like C, a Hindu Bangladeshi. This brief sketch from our fieldnotes explicitly shows the multifaceted

character of C’s identity and his way of enacting that identity. In his social actions and in the way he constitutes himself within discourse can be found the traces of what we identify as an instance of creolisation. In our view creolisation is the process by which subjects are able to constitute for themselves systems of related identities appropriate to the diverse contexts of social interaction, using them strategically in order to reconfigure positions and roles both for themselves and for the ones with whom they interact. While the devices which produce, absorb, reject, and reconfigure diversity within the order of discourse—or “semiosphere”—are at work in most cultural encounters, C’s case stands as a “limit case” whose analysis will allow us to examine the inner mechanism of what we believe to be a model of creolisation. This chapter is based on the documentation produced during C’s process of claiming asylum (that is, the transcripts of C’s interview at the Territorial Commission), and on the life story collected from C two years after he had obtained refugee status (2009–2011). We further refer to ethnographic work carried out in the last few years through our intimate relationships and work with C.

Before presenting C’s case, it is worthwhile elaborating the theoretical framework of our work. In most literature on the subject, the linguistic model of creolisation is transposed to the field of cultural analysis by creating a sort of analogy between language and cultural practice. The most compelling examples in this domain are those by Lee Drummond (1980) and Ulf Hannerz (1987, 1992), studies which have drawn on the notion of the creole continuum elaborated by Derek Bickerton (1973, 1975). According to Bickerton, between the closest approximation of the standard form of a language (the “acrolet”) and the language form farthest

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from the standard (the “basilect”) exists a whole set of linguistic transformations. This set can be represented as an ordered continuum, comprising a series of interrelated varieties understood as intersystems. Between two identified linguistic varieties there is always the possibility of an intersystem that intersects through their respective grammatical functions and acts as an intermediary for the transformation between the two varieties. The importance of Bickerton’s work for our purposes lies in the attention paid to the rules of linguistic transformation of language understood as a dynamic system, rather than in describing it as a static structure on the basis of its invariant patterns. In this way, he paved the way for interesting applications of his model to cultural theory. For instance, carrying out anthropological research in the setting of Guyana as previously studied by Bickerton, Drummond drew a parallel between the linguistic and the cultural intersystem. He noted that people in Guyana employed ethnic categories in much the same fashion as they did grammatical competence, that is by following multiple and incompatible rules. Drummond thus concluded that “there are no definitive criteria for any ethnic category, and hence no invariant relationships between categories”; it is consequently “possible to accommodate internal variation within a continuum model” (1980, 367–368). In another passage, he affirmed that

The systematic nature of culture is thus to be found in relationships which, through a series of transformations, connect one intersystem to another. A cultural continuum, like a linguistic continuum, may be identified by inserting arbitrary boundaries within a transformational series (370).

Thus, according to Drummond, Guyanese creoles “have the routine

choice of constantly bringing into operation a range of ethnic categories [which] form a system of interconnected meanings” (368). In this context, differences are articulated in terms of ethnic categories, which become the basis around which the cultural continuum is organised.

Hannerz, on the other hand, has partly adopted such a model by conceiving it on a global scale. More interested in a worldwide “economy of culture” and on the social organisation of difference, he has translated the continuum as a series of hierarchical connections between centres and peripheries. Hannerz’s model of the cultural continuum appears as a single wide landscape along which social actors move between centres and peripheries according to their interests, their needs, and the relational networks they are able to draw upon. In this way, they achieve cultural competencies that allow them both to express their individuality and to build up their own “habitats of meaning”, habitats which can then be

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shared and crossed with those of others. These processes are articulated within four main frameworks that contain them and make them possible: the state, the market, “movements”, and the form of life (1992). It is at the intersection of these frameworks that cultural transformation takes place and difference comes to be organised on a global level. In this sense, it is thus possible to speak of a “world in creolisation” (1987). Hannerz interestingly explodes the continuum and elaborates a complex and pluri-dimensional model for understanding phenomena of cultural change and production on a wide scale.

Even while drawing on these authors’ work, we proceed in a new direction by elaborating a different model of creolisation. This is done by focusing on three main points. First the subject is elaborated as a strategic operator of discontinuities within any system. Each operation drives the system towards reconfiguration and produces effects of meaning that maintain the memory of this transformation. Thus, second, account is taken of the way in which the acts of creoles affect cultural memory and create the conditions for their own effectiveness. Third, and most important, we build a theoretical model of the “creole” that frees it from any territorial or historical anchorage. The “creole” is, in fact, understood here as an analytic construct rather than as an empirical or historical subject and category. A “creole attitude” is thus attributed to a subject when his way of acting, as in the case of C, shows features akin to those pointed to in our analysis. Such unanchoring does not imply a de-politicisation of the concept; rather, the elaboration of a solid analytical model for understanding creolisation as a specific way of “cultural mixing” will enable a consideration of power relations as central to creolisation.

In order fully to elaborate this model it is necessary to take recourse in the category of discourse as theorised by Foucault.2 By drawing a parallel between discourse and culture, the aim is to identify the macro-field where the analysis below is situated.3 By re-framing Drummond’s and Hannerz’s dynamic systems of culture within the field of discourse, it is possible to

2 See inter alia Foucault 1970, 1972a, 1972b. 3 Foucault himself seemed to confirm such parallels. In an interview with Caruso (in Carrette 1999), he stated: “It is hard for me to classify a form of research like my own within philosophy or within the human sciences. I could define it as an analysis of the cultural facts characterising our culture. In that sense, it would be a question of something like an ethnology of the culture to which we belong. I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted” (91).


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provide the model of the continuum with semantic depth on the one hand and to delineate the emergence of power relations on the empirical level of analysis on the other.

The model of the “semiosphere” borrowed from Lotman is then used to identify, within the overall order of discourse, local systems based on semantic pertinence (Lotman 2009, 2005, 1994). Indeed, the “semiosphere” is a theoretical concept that understands culture as a dynamic system, one which can in turn be articulated internally as binaries or as complex sets of smaller local systems of pertinence. Each of the latter is delimited by a border, which at the same time defines it symmetrically in relation to what is external to it. These two opposite systems interact dialogically by exchanging elements through the border, understood as the place where language springs up and translation occurs. The entrance of extra-systemic elements through the border forces systematic categories to be reformulated and compels the system to reconfigure itself overall in order to reach a new balance. This is what Lotman means when he says that “dialogue precedes language”: relationship is the necessary condition for communication to take place, and not the other way around (1985: 68). At the same time, reasoning in terms of the semiosphere permits us to address discontinuity as a fundamental feature defining cultural transformation. The border, as its principal device, is both the space where transformations take place and the operator of translation between two cultural systems.

Furthermore, the subjectivities involved in the play of identities are produced and transformed on the level of these local systems of pertinence. In order better to explain this process these systems are conceived as “texts” and thus taken as appropriate objects of analysis. It is important to emphasise that “texts” does not stand in for “documents”. The concept of “text” used here is that of structural semiotics, understood as “the semantic representation of discourse” (Greimas 1979: 359). In this way, text not only concerns language but also comprises all the semiotic forms through which sense becomes manifest (see Greimas 1979, 1983; and Fabbri 1998). In this respect ethnography helps in delineating such texts and drawing them out in all their complexity. By carving texts out in this manner, they are elaborated on their discursive levels, thus permitting an analysis of the devices that lead to the affirmation of subjectivity. Spatial organisation, temporality, relations between subjects, objects and field of values, the emergence of voice and of the subjectivity that lay behind these: all this will be the main elements of inquiry. The analysis of these textual functions and devices leads to the description of the system of interdefined subjectivities that the creole has projected on diverse planes of pertinence.

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A fundamental aspect of this kind of methodological and theoretical approach is that it draws out the particular way in which the creole produces subjectivities and identities. Indeed, his ability lies in transforming the multiple identities he manages into different facets of a unique multidimensional identity. His attitude is that of strategically acting against ascriptions to only one of several socio-cultural categories and the reification of identity. While multiple identities can be seen as functional in strategies of “camouflage”, a multidimensional identity does not erase differences. Instead, it produces them. The creole establishes discontinuities on the cultural continuum through the strategic creation of borders and projects the portions thus cut out along different planes of pertinence. He always manages to place himself at the point of intersection between these various dimensions. The paradox of such a system is that the creole builds on each plane a subjectivity that is appropriate to the discursive order that governs it, and he acquires in turn the function of border between all the subsystems thus produced. In this way, the creole is always able to translate one subjectivity into the other, and he thus maintains the unity of the identity constellation revolving around him. This chapter’s analysis thus allows for discovering whether and when an intersystem exists between two systems of pertinence. The attempt here is, therefore, to move from a mono-planar conception of the continuum to a three-dimensional one. On the other hand, this model could itself prove useful for detecting the possibility of social and cultural change at the intersection of macro-models of culture-as-discourse and micro-practices of resistance based on the re-articulation of local systems of pertinence. The attention given to the concept of the border⎯which can, in turn, be understood as a discursive device⎯permits the integration of these two different dimensions of analysis: that is, the vertical one of discursive devices and the horizontal one implied by processes of translation.

To sum up, we combine a linguistic model of creolisation with both a semiotic approach and a political anthropology that pays attention to Foucault’s insights. In this way an analytical model emerges that is able to lend a three-dimensionality to the understanding of creolisation, reconfiguring continuum theories as a theory of semiospheres and their related borders.4 At the same time, and most importantly, the model constructed here explicitly accounts for disparities of power and hierarchical relations as variables affecting and influencing both the ways interactions between actors are shaped and their outcomes. This aspect is

4 For efforts in a similar vein, though based on different theoretical premises, see Drummond (1996) and his concept of the “semiospace”.


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fundamental as it allows for overcoming the oft-observed risk, inherent in approaches considering creolisation generally as a process of cultural mixing, of disregarding the unequal positions subjects find themselves in within most cultural and social interactions (see Palmié 2006; Sheller 2003).

Before continuing with our analysis, a few words on the central theme of voice are necessary. The entry of C as a creole into a system of cultural references is always an “explosive event”, one that compels translation devices in ways that are unpredictable.5 Even though the system eventually re-organises and finds a new balance after his intervention, C’s success lays indeed in his capacity to produce, through his strategic action, an effectiveness in relation to his aims. In order to show how the experiences of C can make such processes explicit, we will detect his strategic acting within narrative and point out how he narrates. This will permit the identification within narration of a creole modality for constructing subjectivity. Since subjectivity is expressed through communicative forms within discourse, the analysis proceeds by considering how it is made present—that is, sensible—through voice. A threefold relation can be identified: voice demonstrates a subjectivity that is correlated to a subject. Indeed, the play of identities comprises the possibility of establishing, through the emergence of voice, a firm relation between the subject and the subjectivity produced within discourse. Voice is thus not conceived as “what one says”; rather it is every perceptible autonomous manifestation of subjectivity. The relation between voice and subject, though, is neither genetic nor natural. On the contrary, it is reconstructed analytically within discourse. Voice is conceived both as trace and result of specific efficacious strategies enacted by subjects.6 By considering voice as the point of emersion of a subject’s successful strategic action and by looking at how it can effectively find its way through the diverse devices that organise discourse, we will show in this way how the “voice in C” points to the working of a creole attitude.

5 Lotman has described this process thus: “In the moment that the texts of [an] external language are drawn into the space of culture an act of explosion occurs. Explosion can be interpreted as the moment of the collision of two opposing languages: the assimilating and the assimilated. An explosive space appears: a cluster of unpredictable possibilities” (2009, 135). 6 The works of Ranajit Guha (1982, 1983a, 1983b) and of other scholars belonging to the school of subaltern studies provide critical reflections on the relation between historical sources, subaltern subjects, voice, and the production of subjectivities. For an important discussion of this issue, also see Spivak (1988).

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2. The Story of C We met C at Il Veliero, a temporary help centre for asylum seekers

created in Follonica by the Italian government in 2008 in the wake of the arrival of large numbers of migrants in Lampedusa. Il Veliero were—and still are— privately owned buildings used in summertime as a tourist camp. Bearing numerous nationalities (Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan), almost two hundred applicants for asylum arrived in October 2008. They needed accommodation for five months, and their stay at Il Veliero produced a situation of intercultural cohabitation by people slotted into the asylum seeking process.

In order better to understand the subject of this chapter, it is useful briefly to describe the process of claiming asylum under Italian law. The first step, both for people entering illegally and legally, is to apply for asylum at a police station near their place of residence or the port of their arrival. Applicants complete an application form (Form C3), providing information about family, provenance, religious affiliation, ethnic and national origin, education, languages spoken, profession, and reasons for seeking asylum. In the case of speakers of foreign languages, applicants have legal right to an interpreter. After collecting the C3 forms, police officers send the asylum applications to the appropriate Territorial Commission (TC), which is then legally obligated to interview asylum seekers as soon as possible. That said, applicants usually wait between three and twelve months—and sometimes even longer—before having their case heard by the TC. In the meantime, applicants without documents or those who entered Italy illegally have to stay inside the buildings and centres set aside for asylum claimants. Each TC is chaired by an officer of the prefecture and comprises that officer, a police officer, a representative of territorial institutions (the municipality or state–cities conference), and a representative of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Interviews with applicants should normally be conducted with all the commission’s members present, but interviews are often held with only one member, in order to expedite the process. The idiosyncrasies of individual officials are thus amplified. This furthermore increases the likelihood of individual officers applying different standards in gathering information about claimants and judging cases more arbitrarily according to the interviewers’ backgrounds. The risk of this happening increases further with the fact that applicants rarely have the opportunity to hire legal representation to support them in their claims. If the TC grants neither refugee status nor subsidiary protection, applicants


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can appeal in the civil courts. As other scholars have stressed (Good 2007, Vacchiano 2005), the

principal evidence most asylum seekers have at their disposal is their individual narrative of their persecution. Vacchiano has further observed that TCs generally grant refugee status in Italy on the basis of applicants’ ability to produce a “justified traumatic story” (2005: 90). Rather than demonstrating the risk of potential traumas, they should therefore certify those they have suffered. In Italy asylum claimants have at least two opportunities to tell their stories: first, when filling in the C3 form and, second, before the TC. It is primarily by comparing these two narratives and finding inconsistencies and contradictions by questioning applicants about their stories that TCs assess claimants’ credibility and decide whether or not to grant international protection.

It is within this legal framework and against the backdrop of the establishment of new kinds of help centres such as Il Veliero that C’s life trajectory in Italy took shape.

At the end of November 2008 a convention established between the University of Siena’s Department of Social Sciences, Follonica Municipality and Il Veliero provided for a group of anthropologists to visit the centre regularly and meet asylum seekers staying there as part of the anthropologists’ research projects. This peculiar situation of relatively unfettered access to the world of Italian asylum seekers’ shelters has been the context of our work with Pakistani and Bangladeshi asylum claimants. Among these claimants, we established a close relation with two young men, S and C, both Hindu by religion. Our acquaintance with S and C was aided by the fact that they both spoke Hindi and C also spoke some English.7 They had both applied for asylum on the basis of being persecuted for their religious and political affiliations. S was denied asylum by the Territorial Commission of Rome, a case we have already analysed elsewhere (see Sbriccoli and Jacoviello 2011). C was granted asylum by the same TC and, after the help centre was disbanded, he continued working at Il Veliero as a labourer on a part-time contract.

From the outset, C was capable of establishing relationships with many of the Italians working in the centre (for example, the director of Il Veliero, the cultural mediator, the doctor of the establishment, policemen, social workers, political activists, and the anthropologists from the University). At first he was most concerned with establishing contacts

7 One of the authors, Sbriccoli, has conducted research in Rajasthan, India, for the past nine years. His knowledge of Hindi has been the principal reason permitting him to interact with Pakistani and Bangladeshi asylum seekers at Il Veliero.

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with local people, learning Italian, and organising his life in the new environment according to his own individual strategy. He managed to deal with all these resources perfectly well in order to prepare himself for his interview with the TC. After being granted refugee status, he mobilised these relationships and resources in creating his new life in Italy. Most asylum seekers lived within the camp, enclosed within the borders of their own community, and made use of common strategies both for gaining asylum status and for mobilising resources collectively through shared social and political networks. During the entire period of our observations, all asylum seekers perceived their sometimes quite lengthy waits in the camp until their interviews with the TC as a constraint on the prosecution of their migration project. Most problems between claimants and the authorities at Il Veliero arose precisely from opposing perceptions of time. For the police and the prefecture, waiting was a corollary to the proper bureaucratic procedure. Asylum seekers, on the other hand, saw it as an unjustified delay in the recognition of their situation. In a different way, C conceived the time he had at his disposal in the camp as a kind of training period, and he used it to prepare as best he could for the interview with the TC. Most asylum seekers sought the Siena anthropologists’ support in collecting their life stories and acting as mediators between them and the social worker cum expert who offered to help them. This support was intended to be a tool for understanding whether applicants’ cases fit with normative expectations of asylum. It would thus ostensibly embolden them through the collection of further data corroborating their various stories. C, though, nearly always acted autonomously, helped only in gathering together the materials for the file he was to present to the TC (aided, in this case, by Tommaso Sbriccoli). C wrote his own story in English, gave it to the social worker, and analysed her comments. He then used his acquaintance with a doctor at Il Veliero to get an official evaluation of his injuries and obtained from Bangladesh a number of official documents affirming his story. Finally, he carefully prepared himself for his interview and effected an individual strategy for achieving his goal of asylum. This strategy and its elaboration are considered below.

3. The Interview: Voice and Effectiveness

C’s asylum hearing before the TC is the first case study examined here, done so through an examination of the transcript of the interview. Through analysing the document and the conditions of its production and by understanding them as a complex text, what emerges is the way in which C strategically sets new borders within discourse, placing both himself and


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others in the new maps he draws. An important concept to be introduced here is that of “specificity”, a concept that helps to understand the way in which C’s creole strategy functions. Lotman himself cautions that, “insofar as the space of the semiosphere has an abstract character, its boundary cannot be visualized by means of the concrete imagination”.8 With this in mind, the system of pertinence can at first be imagined as a circle. All that is near the boundary of this circle acquires a specificity because of its proximity to that which is external to it (a different system of pertinence). The elements near the centre, on the contrary, possess shared properties to a great extent and are, in this way, “a-specific”. C tries to reconfigure the relations and the hierarchy among the actors involved in his discourse by playing with his own specificity and a-specificity within the semiosphere. In this way, he sets the conditions within which his narrative can become more effective and forces the people with whom he interacts to negotiate their beliefs about his—and their own—identity. This becomes more clear in the analysis of the hearing, the transcript of which follows.

At the beginning of the interview the applicant points out that he finds it difficult to carry out the interview with a Muslim interpreter. He is told that the interpreter is a professional and that religion does not affect the way he performs his job. The applicant accepts to do the interview.

Entrance in Italy I arrived in Italy on 28 October 2008. Itinerary of travel I left from Dhaka at the beginning of August 2008, with a direct flight I reached Libya, with an hour transit in Qatar. In Libya I arrived in Tripoli. I travelled first with a Bengali trafficker, than with a Libyan trafficker. I stayed in Libya three months, once police arrested me and kept me in prison for eight to ten days. Then, in a small ship I reached Lampedusa. The cost for the whole trip was €4 000, money which was given to me by my father and my brothers. Presentation of the asylum application in Italy I officially made my application for political asylum at the Follonica police

8 The whole passage reads: “Insofar as the space of the semiosphere has an abstract character, its boundary cannot be visualised by means of the concrete imagination. Just as in mathematics the border represents a multiplicity of points, belonging simultaneously to both the internal and external space, the semiotic border is represented by the sum of bilingual translatable ‘filters’, passing through which the text is translated into another language (or languages), situated outside the given semiosphere” (Lotman 2005, 208–209).

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station. Ethnic group Bengali. Religion I am Hindu. Political orientation I have never been involved in politics. Personal and family situation of the applicant in the country of origin I was born and grew up in […].9 My family consists of my father, my mother, and five children including me, three sons and two daughters. I am unmarried. I studied at university, where for two years I attended courses in political science, philosophy, and Muslim history. I moved five kilometres away from my village for studying, to the town of […], at the University of […]. (Photocopies of the applicant’s university and school certificates are attached.) I did not work; my father supported me financially with the help of my brothers. My father is a teacher in a private school. After my studies at university, I tried to study English in order to move to the USA in order to achieve my academic potential. After my studies I lived in the ISKCON temple in Dhaka (a photocopy is attached). While I was studying at […] University I met some Islamic extremists; it was […]. A Muslim teacher at the university, whose name is […], began to speak ill of Hindus and their history. I protested and, due to this, the fundamentalists began to attack and threaten me. They shot me in the back, I fell, and they jumped on me. Thinking I was dead, they left me there. Some people passing by brought me to hospital, saving my life. This happened on […]. I spent twenty days in hospital (a medical certificate of the Bangladeshi doctor and one of the doctors at the refugee centre in Italy are attached). Afterwards, the Islamic group that attacked me came to know that I was alive and, with the support of JMB, they began to look for me. Since March […] I started to live in hiding, in […], at a relative’s place. Here in Italy, speaking by phone with my family, I came to know that one of my brothers had been assaulted and threatened by the same group which attacked me (a certificate issued to the applicant’s brother by the hospital is attached). My uncle, as well, has had the same kind of problems and he has fled to the USA, where he currently lives (the applicant provides the documentation of the uncle who applied for asylum in the USA. A declaration of the major of his village, where the alleged problems happened, is attached). Reasons for leaving the country The violent aggression and the threats suffered because of Muslims have pushed me to flee. Do you believe you would meet problems if you went back to your country? If I come back to my country they will find me and kill me, because they

9 Details of C’s life are removed to ensure his anonymity.


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control a network widespread all over South Asia. Further elements applicant wants to report I have nothing to add. Let us begin our analysis with the first lines of the hearing, with C

asking for a new translator. C justifies this request by stating that the interpreter is a Muslim Bangladeshi, therefore belonging to the category that has allegedly persecuted him. It is interesting to note that while the conditions of the interview place the applicant in front of a border to be crossed (in this particular case, a legal border), the interpreter, in his function as translator, could be ideally placed at the border in-between two different cultural systems. Interpreters are normally legal migrants who have lived in Italy for quite a long time, even if they often still live in the marginal condition typical of migrants. At the socio-cultural level we can thus consider their position as “on this side” of the border but still near it. Despite this, the interpreter, as far as he is part of the bureaucratic machine of the asylum system in Italy, shares with the interviewer some qualities, which sanction his belonging to the normative and institutional system by which C has to be recognised and received.

By asking the Commission for a different translator, C acknowledges and attributes to the one present a quality that gives him a specificity, that is, his Muslim-ness. This specificity, in turn, is identified as a quality different from that shared by both C and the interviewer. In order to reconfigure the relationships between the actors at play, C in fact neutralises his own specificity as Hindu and implicitly defines himself as non-Muslim, an attribute shared with the interviewer. In this way, C draws a border between the participants in this small social drama. He places the translator outside the new system he organises, one in which he occupies the centre and the interviewer is welcomed. C becomes in this way the “polariser” of this new configuration, displacing the Italian state and its representative, the interviewer, in that role. In modelling this new system, C affirms an axis defining an inside and outside. He does so by establishing an analogy between the oppositions Hindus–Muslims and Christians–Muslims and by taking advantage of the latter’s axiological values. In this way, he identifies the translator as the enemy. At the same time C situates the interpreter-cum-enemy within their common place of origin, Bangladesh: that is, the country C needs to demonstrate has been the setting for his persecution because of his faith. Inside the interview room, the interpreter has thus become the real and present evidence (an exemplum) of the faraway situation C is about to narrate.

This strategy aims to strengthen the effectiveness of C’s narrative, but it drives the interviewer into a move of counter-balancing. The official re-

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establishes the fact of the border, the guarantee of the Italian legal system, stating as he does that the specificity (to be a Muslim) of the interpreter organised by C is, in the venue of the hearing, not pertinent. The official thus neutralises it. The support for the effectiveness of his story thus erected by C nevertheless stands, as does its tangibility as evidence. The venue of the interview thus turns into the scene of a trial where C’s role changes from that of a witness to his own identity to that of a witness to another’s guilt. Thanks to this device the interviewer can no longer neutralise C’s voice and is forced instead to hear it: everything he says could, in fact, be distorted by the interpreter. C compels the Commission to listen to his story, which is no longer a set of clues to be verified (see Sbriccoli and Jacoviello 2011) but is rather a perceptible thing to be heard, that is, a voice.

This point clearly emerges if we compare C’s interview with transcripts of other applicants’ hearings (Sbriccoli and Jacoviello 2011; and Sbriccoli and Perugini, forthcoming). In other hearings, asylum seekers’ voices appear as fragments emerging upon the surface of a text organised according to the norms and discursive styles of the TCs’ officials. These texts bear the traces of a strategy both of falsification of evidence submitted by applicants and of the neutralisation of their subjectivities.

In the work conducted with S, another Bangladeshi asylum seeker hosted at “Il Veliero”, the analysis of the transcript of the interview before the TC showed how the latter’s epistemic strategy consisted “implicitly in extrapolating details from the statements [of the interviewed] and producing a set of singular clues or signs which [could] be cross-checked in search of a contradictory one-to-one correspondence.” (Sbriccoli and Jacoviello 2011: 184–185). Discursive syntax appeared broken and overall causality (which in C’s case is maintained) was set aside in favour of the construction of what we have termed “casualness”. In the process of establishing “facts”, the commission’s interviewer displayed a “semiological” attitude, in as much as he supposed that single clues could be established as proof only when, as symptoms, they showed a motivated relation with their referent. Thus, the strategy of the TC interviewer was that of falsification of clues. He aimed to demonstrate that statements were contradictory, appearances misleading and that it was not possible to relate narrated things to supposed “facts”. As a consequence, all the signs and statements lost the status of “clues”, becoming instead evidence that was not pertinent. Through this discursive and epistemological strategy, facts are thus constructed by the TC only on the basis of what is verifiable in the very moment of the interview. In this way, the temporal, spatial, and historical “elsewhere”—which is the original context of the


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applicant’s story—is erased whenever it is not possible to encounter it by signs present in the “here and now” of the interview.

With C, however, voice occurs as authoritative answers that distinctly evince the subjectivity of the subject producing it. Narrated events clearly flow according to a principle of causality, and the narrative articulates itself in relation to a topology and a chronology that allow those who listen to it to gauge the distances traversed. This, in turn, enables listeners to attest to the gap between the place of origin and that of arrival, as well as the transformations the subject of the story has thus faced. The devices enacted within the narrative build on its discursive level the instance of a listener who shares the narrator’s competencies, both in terms of the events and their veracity. The effectiveness of C’s narration drives the TC official into associating himself with such a discursive simulacrum and with the judgement already implicit in it. As we have already shown, the TC interviewer no longer has to decide the truth of C’s story so much as he has to assess the guilt of his persecutors.

As we have seen, the initial shift of borders enacted by C allowed him temporarily to reconfigure the discursive machine into which he was about to be inserted. Even if the system achieved a new balance, the effect was such that it still allowed his story to be heard in its own right. As such, voice can be understood as the trace of the effectiveness of strategic actions such as C’s. At the same time, the emergence of voice is also the result of this effectiveness; this creole attitude enables the subject autonomously to produce his subjectivity within discourse, thus providing space for the construction of a narrative capable of hosting the other within it. Finally, voice can also be used as an instrument. The initial request by C for a substitute interpreter on account of his religious affiliation prefigured the narrative that was to follow and eventually confirmed the applicant’s suspicion. In this respect, and thanks to the tangible presence of his voice, the narration constructed the field upon which C could avow the truth of what he was telling. Rather than offering himself as an object to be translated, C strived from the outset to translate himself in order to project his own subjectivity beyond the border. This translation, though, is not linear. As will be seen in the following, it works by producing discontinuities and by translating not only C’s but also the identities of the other subjects with whom he is in relation.

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4. Retelling His Own Story. The Life of a Refugee

As soon as C obtained the status of political refugee, he moved into the house of the old father of one of the Italian social workers with whom he had established good relations during his staying at Il Veliero. He paid no rent but had to take care of the acquaintance’s father and keep the large house clean in the time left to him after working, first, as a labourer at Il Veliero and, later, in a local chemical factory. C thus led a busy and demanding life, always on the move from work to home, itself another place of work. He faced abusive treatment at Il Veliero (not receiving his salary for many months) and had much difficulty in finding his way in his new social and cultural setting. At the same time he was determined to lead an autonomous life and be integrated in Italian culture and the local community. He worked hard to learn Italian and participated as a volunteer in local associations for the organisation of festivals and initiatives. He spent at least half an hour every evening sitting in the village piazza with the old men who gather there for a chat. He also kept in contact with many of the Italian friends he had the chance to meet at Il Veliero. We frequently met him, sometimes just to spend time together, sometimes to help him in his dealings with the Italian bureaucracy, as in the case of his attempts to recover his pay from Il Veliero. On one of these occasions, two years after C had been granted asylum, we decided to interview him to see whether his story had changed and to learn more about his life in Italy: what did he think of his life there and what did he expect of it? Two excerpts from these interviews, considered below, illustrate the effectiveness of C’s production of subjectivity through his voice. The first concerns his time in a Libyan jail and is presented with multiple shifts of identities and their interplay. The second takes place in an Italian kitchen and tests the power of objects as sites for the accretion of values and social relations. It is important to specify here that, in both cases, C’s narrative is not to be confused with an ethnography of the events narrated. We will refer to it as the discursive surface upon which it is possible to detect the strategy of a subject. By analysing the working of such strategy its success can be identified through the effects it has had on ourselves, as can his failure be seen in the impossibility of C in translating himself autonomously.


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4.1 The Conversion: Borders and Devices

C arrived in Libya by airplane and spent nearly three months there. He lived in segregated housing for a long period of time, and was later arrested, tortured, and jailed for a month.10 By his account, there were eight hundred prisoners staying there. The jail comprised eight big cells, each one with a hundred inmates. Prisoners were served a loaf of bread twice a day, with either some butter or some fruit juice. There were no beds or furniture in the cells, and there was only one bathroom (in reality, a hole in the floor) for all hundred prisoners. The latter could avail themselves of one hour out of the cell each day. Conditions were thus very hard, and many fell ill, including C. Despite this hardship, solidarity developed among the prisoners, as C’s words clearly show. It was in this context that the events narrated by C took place.

Among us everybody helped; if one got ill, everybody helped. For me, I said that the eight hundred people, they were all friends of mine because everybody helped me. I fell ill, I had fever, and in my room everybody cared for me, everybody, but there was an Egyptian man who was bad to me. When the time for Muslim prayer came, he told me “come and pray!”, even though I am not Muslim. But in Libya I said I was Muslim. So he said: “Come and pray.” I am not able to pray, and I said “No, I don’t want to now, I’m feeling bad.” “You come!”, he said and then he threw me on the ground. He hurt me. From a different cell another black boy came, an African, he was Christian, don’t know if Catholic, I told him: “He threw me on the ground, picked me up, and threw me again down.” “Why?” “Because I didn’t pray,” and he immediately stood up for me. After that the Egyptian was afraid, never gave me problems anymore, the other said to him, “If you do it once more I will throw you on the ground.” Later, the day after, there was a new Christian meeting, they are called “born again”, always Christian, don’t know what religion, but Christian, and they made me convert to Christianity, so later I became Christian. Inside the jail, they put me in the middle, they went around me in circles, then they baptised me. But I don’t remember well. I think with water. All the boys said a gospel. They spoke before, then I spoke. It was in English. They baptised that “Jesus is the son of God, I believe Jesus, Jesus is the son…” [in English in the interview], then I don’t remember. It was all in English.

10 This is one of the incongruities of the hearing before the TC. C stated there that he had spent only eight to ten days in jail. The new narrative is otherwise consistent with the previous one, showing that a sort of crystallisation of the plot has taken place. At the same time, though, C’s capacity for reactivating parts of it toward a present performativity remains impressive.

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The episode illustrates perfectly how C plays with his identities according to complex strategies. In Libya, by pretending to be Muslim, he adopted from the outset a mimetic strategy in order to protect himself from possible discrimination and potential aggression. In jail, though, he found himself in a difficult situation when he was repeatedly asked to demonstrate his Muslim identity by praying with the others. He resisted to a certain extent, until the pressure resulted in violence and in the risk of being unmasked. This strategy of camouflage is not creole: it simply allowed C to neutralise his own identity during his wait. C offered himself as the object of a predictable translation and acquired a position already set within the community, one with predetermined relationships and roles. This process of identification enabled him to live peacefully with his fellow inmates. As he states at the beginning of the interview, “eight hundred persons were all friends of mine.” It must nevertheless be borne in mind that producing oneself autonomously within discourse is not the same as automatically producing an autonomous subjectivity within it. Consequently, C remained silent in order to make his voice unheard. The voice he should speak from the role he occupies, in fact, is that of a Muslim prayer: a voice that he does not know how to articulate. It is at this point that a new character entered the scene, one that helps him find a way out of the stalemate into which he fell. The African Christian offered him both protection and the possibility, through conversion, of projecting himself in a new position. In this sense, conversion enables C to place himself once more at the centre of a new system of pertinence. His lack of competence is no longer salient, for being a convert structurally presupposes it.

This episode allows us to see at work the concepts presented above and assess their usefulness. C, through mimesis, initially obtained an a-specific condition within the jail’s semiosphere. At this stage, he was Muslim like everyone else and everyone was a friend. As soon as the need to demonstrate his competence and assert his supposed identity forced him closer to the border and thus marked him with a negative specificity, the prison system appeared articulable as two subsystems in relation to religious belonging: the Muslims and the Christians. Conversion was, thus, the already prepared device through which C managed to be inserted into the Christian subsystem. Although it is an institutional device set up by religions to assimilate external subjects to their discursive system, C played with it in order to cause an explosive process that allowed him to get out from the system of pertinence established by the Muslim community and set the grounds for the production of a new autonomous subjectivity. The performative spatial structure of the ritual of conversion


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could be seen as prefiguring the rebirth of C at the centre of the new community, considered as a metaphor for the new articulation of the semiosphere.

C reconfigured the overall system by producing new borders around himself. Muslims are now projected beyond the border as others, while C, at the same time, produced anew his relationships inside the jail. Furthermore, within the overall system of the jail, his conversion reproduced the conflict he fled in Bangladesh between a Muslim majority and a minority to which he belongs. His new Christian subjectivity turned out to be coherent and translatable with the others he has at his disposal. With this move, C was once more able to manage the diverse subjectivities that compose the various facets of his identity along multiple relational dimensions. Placed at the crossing of all these semantic subsystems, he is capable to translate each into the other over and over again. Indeed, during his storytelling under the oak he easily projected onto the situation around him the conflict that had been internal to the jail. By referring to the supposed Christianity of all those present at the party in Tuscany, he configured their positions in relation both to the Muslim prisoners who threatened him and to themselves as members of the same imagined community. Thanks to the effectiveness of his narration and the continuous translation of his subjectivity from one plane to another, C put into relation all the characters of his narrative and his journey with those present there, in that very moment, attributing to them the role of witnesses of his suffering and his story, in a way quite similar to his strategy in his asylum hearing. His creole attitude emerges once again at the end: after defining a Christian dimension as a plane including all the people at the party, C is compelled to escape even this identity marker:

Tommaso (T): So, they converted and baptised you…. C: Yes, because everybody there was religious. They were all interested in religion. But I am not interested in religion so much, because I am slowly…. I am still Hindu, but I am slowly going atheist. I do not believe so much in religion. After predicating himself as Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Hindu

again, C decided once more to turn his identity towards a new neutralisation to clear the way for potentially new re-articulations of the relational system in which he is immersed. By placing himself strategically at the crossing of different subsystems of pertinence and by consequently setting borders that produce the continuous re-positioning of the people who interact with him, C uses the devices he handle adeptly on the discursive level to make his acting as effective as possible. He always

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tries to act as the operator of translation between different semantic and relational planes. Sometimes, though, this strategy fails.

4.2 Artichokes, or the Power of Objects

As has been shown above, from the outset C had an attitude about planning his life in his new country that was markedly different from those of the other asylum seekers and refugees we met. He invariably acted individually and committed himself to establishing relationships with the Italians he encountered rather than with other Bangladeshis in situations similar to his. Interestingly, most of the Bangladeshis who stayed at Il Veliero now live together in Rome in shared housing. Even S, the Hindu Bangladeshi whose legal case we have discussed elsewhere (Sbriccoli and Jacoviello 2011), lives there with other Bangladeshi Muslims. Instead, C made his way through Italian society following an independent and autonomous path, and he endeavoured always to be fully integrated with his new social and cultural environment. After being granted asylum, he accepted the invitation of a social worker (“D”) he met at Il Veliero to live in the house of his father, a man called “X” here. X is a rich old man who lives in a large medieval palace located in a small town in southern Tuscany. He is in need of constant care . Being the only Bangladeshi in his area and having to care for X in his spare time, C completely immersed himself in the habits and way of life of his locality. He sometimes goes to Rome to meet S, who has remained his best friend in Italy, and these are the only times when he eats Bangladeshi food, a fact he has often mentioned to us. Nonetheless, he never complains, and instead has made the aphorism “when in Rome do as the Romans” his own. Examining a discussion with C of his relationship with X concerning a particular event and C’s view of it permits us to consider below how his creole attitude works and, in some cases such as this, patently fails.

Thus: T: Now you live in D’s house, do you help his father, X? C: Yes, of course, he loves me as a son. T: Did you face any difficulties in changing everything you were used to? Food, way of living, and so on …. C: No, no difficulties at all. Because he loves me as a son. But he wants me to change my culture, to be a westerner. For this reason he doesn’t give me Bangladeshi food, doesn’t want me to speak Bengali, he says: “if you let go these Bangladeshis, you try to forget what they eat, how they speak, and you become Italian like us, you will be happy. If you get stuck in the middle, between Italians and Bangladeshis, you will have problems.”


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T: And you? What do you think about it? C: This is right. Because if I can change and become like an Italian, completely Italian by culture, food, everything, maybe it would be better. Instead, if I stay in the middle, half Italian and half Bangladeshi …. T: And now how do you feel? C: I feel half and half, because I still don’t forget Bangladeshi food and culture. This is bad for me. Better to choose one side, either Bangladeshi or Italian. Stefano (S): You are living in D’s house, why? C: Because D helped me at Il Veliero, when I was a refugee, when all that came to an end he told me: “If you want you can stay with us.” S: So he welcomed you, he hosted you…. C: Yes, he hosted me. I am a guest in his house. S: Didn’t he ask you to work for him? C: No! No, I am their guest, a guest. T: But do you help in the house? C: Yes, this is normal if you live together with someone. S: If you had to explain your role in the family, what would you say? C: I have my private room, a bathroom, everything, only we share the kitchen. When I come back in the evening [from work] I cook together with D’s father, we cook together, I set the table, clear away, everything. I help. For he is 82 years old, isn’t he? I live with him. I cannot sit and eat, I have to do everything, I have to consider that. T: How do you behave in Bangladesh with old people? Is it different from Italy? C: Yes, a little bit different. We give a lot of respect to old people. In front of them youth don’t smoke, they don’t sit together, it is a matter of respect. On the train and on the bus we let old people have our seats, we respect them more than in Italy. I can see here that the young smoke together, don’t let them sit, they chat with them and they don’t give much respect. I respect X as a Bangladeshi. I treat him as a Bangladeshi. But when I speak with him I don’t use a form of courtesy, because he tells me: “You are like my son, in the family you can use ‘tu’, exactly as I do in Bangladesh with my mother and father. As is clear from the interview excerpts above, C uses Bangladeshi

kinship categories and their associated behaviours to translate himself into an Italian system of relationships as a member of the family rather than as a personal carer. As C presents himself alternately as a guest and as X’s son, all the practices that could be ascribed to a work relationship are reconfigured under the form of mutual affection, respect, or exchange. Even if he says that he would like to become fully Italian and forget Bangladeshi culture, in producing his new subjectivity he provides it with those competencies from his Bangladeshi background that seem most effective in achieving his objective. By overlapping two different systems

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of pertinence in this way, he attempts to reconfigure the situation of subalternity and dependency in which he could be seen as different to one in which he can be seen as equal.

As an instance of C producing autonomous subjectivities by pairing and crossing different systems of reference, consider his statement that young people should not sit together with the elderly. In the first instance, C justifies his not eating with X. He prepares everything for him and eats either after him or during his preparation of X’s meal. The possible interpretation of this fact as evidence of a relation of service between C and X is thus nullified by C associating it with specific practices of respect linked to particular kinship relations in Bangladesh.

The discrepancy between these two interpretations turns into a small drama when translatability between the two planes is prevented by events.

While walking in the narrow streets of the village where C lives, near

the medieval walls of the castle-like palace where he stays with X, C began to tell us about a new competence he had acquired thanks to X: the preparation of artichokes preserved in oil.

C: Last month X bought fifty kilos of artichokes. He wanted to do them in oil and he taught me the procedure. We spent one entire weekend in their preparation. He told me what to do, and I did it. I cleaned and cook them. Then I put them in jars and filled the jars with oil. I boiled the jars once closed and then everything was ready. It was really demanding, also because I worked for the whole week and at the weekend I usually rest. But at the end we prepared a lot of jars. T: Were they good? Did you already taste them? C: Not yet, unfortunately not. X gave away most of the jars as gifts to his friends and relatives. I didn’t want to say that he shouldn’t, but they were our artichokes. While preparing artichokes C’s strategy seems still to be effective. In

fact, by showing that he had acquired the skills X taught him, he is convinced he is following a path towards integration into the family. C ascribes both himself and X the role of subjects completing the task together. It is on the basis of this equivalence that the sense of belonging to the family is premised. When X later becomes the autonomous subject giving the gift of the artichokes, though, C is relegated to the role of helper who has no voice in deciding the artichokes’ fate. In these two different systems of relation between subjects and objects, the value of the latter contributes to the construction of the identities of the subjects to whom they are linked. While in the first instance the artichokes as object are charged with a modal value (“to be able to be part of the family”) with


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which C still maintains a relation, in the second the object bears the discrete value of C’s work. The dynamic of the gift therefore reveals C’s true role in this situation: that is, that of servant. His work is alienated, together with the relational value he had invested in the artichokes. At this point, he can no longer translate his role as autonomous agent from one frame to the other, and he is ejected from the system of relationships into which he had tried to interpose himself. The two systems of pertinence C had articulated together by placing himself at the centre of both are, in the end, distinguished and torn apart by X. The regime of control over objects enacted by C fails to supersede the regime of control over objects enacted by X, who attaches a material—and not a moral—value to them. Objects show in this way their strength and effectiveness as substantiations of social relationships based on differences in power. In this case, C’s inability to translate himself meant it was not possible for him to reconfigure the system. His creole strategy fails here in as much as it cannot destabilise the configuration of power into which he is embedded. C is thus forced to adhere to the identity of worker that X has projected for and onto him. In this instance, his answer could be either to try again to be inserted in a way that he finds suitable or to radicalise his marginality.

During the interview, C told us about the idea of marrying his fiancée and bringing her to Italy. A few weeks later he told us he was thinking of leaving X’s house to join S in Rome, where he could live with his Bangladeshi friends. He is now living alone in his own rented house in the same small Tuscan village where he once lived with X. His flat is above the bar in the central piazza of the village, and he still spends at least half an hour every day chatting with the old men who gather there before sunset.

5. Conclusion

In this chapter we have proposed an analytic model for describing the creole attitude and to demonstrate its operative utility. In so doing an analogy has been propounded between the notion of the “continuum” as a model of representation for culture and the concept of “discourse” as Foucault and continental post-structuralism have elaborated. Furthermore, with its potential internal articulation as dynamic systems of semantic pertinence, the notion of the “semiosphere” as a model of representation for discourse has, in turn, finally proved appropriate in defining the portions of epistemes that intervene as the condition for the generation of meaning in specific situations. These situations—sets of practices that also comprise language as a form of expression and a device for achieving

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effectiveness—can be described as texts. To analyse texts along the levels of organisation of their meaning has permitted the accurate description of subjectivity’s production as an effect of discursive devices.11 It has shown, at the same time and without any psychological implication, how diverse subjectivities can be the domain of a single subject. Finally, the analysis has highlighted how the structure of a subject (and, so, his power) can be determined within discourse through his relation with an object and the values with which it is charged.

Furthermore, the semiosphere model has allowed us to understand the border as the horizon within which the agency of subjects and their identities acquire meaning. At the same time, the presence of a border establishes two a-symmetrical systems of pertinence which, in order to interact, constitute the categories of a language through which it is possible to describe, communicate, compare, and change the configuration of the world we are in.12 By analysing the function of the border as a device of this kind, it has been observed how specific elements—subjects, objects, discursive configurations—cross it through processes of translation that are the at the heart of cultural transformation. Indeed, Lotman’s model has helped to clarify how processes of translation and explosive events introduce external elements into systems of pertinence and eventually produce a reconfiguration. Processes of translation are operated by filters located at the border and unfold in a predictable way. Contrarily, explosive events imply violent reactions in reconfigurations of systems of pertinence: they restructure both cultural memory and the meaning of current social structures and drive the system towards unpredictable future re-organisations. They thus demand a certain amount of creativity.

The creole displays, at first hand, an attitude of control over processes of translation. As far as he has to deal with his position of subalternity, he is animated to trigger explosive events by means of which he can manage to affirm his vision of the world. The explosions provoked by C have forced people and objects to change their roles, relationships, and

11 The reference for this kind of operation has been Greimas (1983). There he develops the analytical model of the “generative path of meaning”, which articulates syntax and semantics along the following levels: the discursive, the semio-narrative, and deep structural. 12 In Soviet semiotic theory language is considered a “primary modelling system”: that is, it can be used for the description and interpretation of all the other systems of signs. In this respect, a comparison between language thus understood and discourse in the Foucauldian frame can be put forward. For representative Soviet theorists, see inter alia Lotman and Uspenskij 1973; and, Baran, 1976.


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functions in relation to a new system of pertinence. He has thus projected onto subjects and objects with which he interacts some specific features that catch them up in unexpected culturally defined roles.

The effectiveness of such strategies has been assessed through the analysis of how discursive devices have worked and have been employed both to produce subjectivity and to let it emerge. While it is well-known that discourse is resilient, the semiosphere has demonstrated its own particular elasticity as a system, and especially showed itself as a powerful analytical operator in order to detect micro-practices of resistance and their dynamics. Although the system reaches a new balance after an explosive event, it still preserves in its re-configuration the traces of what happened. Our assessment has primarily considered voice as the most pertinent for analysis, as it allows for the tracing of utterances back to the form of the subjectivity that, through it, has entered discourse and obtained a regime of existence.

The creole can produce as many subjectivities as there are planes of pertinence in whose centres he manages to place himself. What is more, the effectiveness of his strategy lies in his ability to control the different sets of rules that govern these various planes (or in the language used throughout this chapter, “texts”) and their mutual translatability. In this way, the creole has the power continuously to manage the distance that separates him and other interacting subjects from the border. C has always been able to assert the credibility of his story and attest to the plausibility of the situations he creates. Sometimes, though, the spell is broken and the creole loses his control over this play of identities. The order of discourse restores the difference between the diverse systems of pertinence. As a consequence, the subject can no longer move from one plane to another and is thus forced to adhere to the dimension and subjectivity that a hegemonic power has assigned him.

When a creole attitude continues to collide with extremely strict devices

set by institutions and disseminated along the order of discourse⎯devices founded on a sharp disparity of power that leave no space for the autonomous production of subjectivity⎯the subject is finally and inevitably forced to retire into pre-determined forms of identity. The value of creolisation as a resource for establishing connections vanishes, either as such a resource for connections between diverse cultural systems or between

people placed within different social positions. More than being a loss for everyone, this process risks the radicalisation of identities. Rather than favouring the strategy of the creole, who enacts creative resistance practices based on actual relationships, these kinds of devices of exclusive power can eventually lead to a conflict between exclusive and non-

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communicating fields. In this way, the polyphonic and polyrhythmic voices of creoles fade away and turn into a chant from afar, whose words we are no longer able to understand.

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