Adrift in International Waters: The 'Ships' of Citizenship in Third Culture Literature
Keywords:
Third Culture Literature, Third Culture Kids, Liminality, Belonging, Sea Passages, Isabel Allende, Ilija TrojanowAbstract
An Indian boy and a Bengal tiger in a lifeboat adrift in the Pacific Ocean; in the Tasman Sea a childless couple rescue a disturbed boy from a shipwrecked boat; a motorboat driven by an American foreign correspondent in the South China Sea fatally hits a girl; and a 12-year-old Indian boy and a white Asian elephant sail to the port of Istanbul on a caravel: Third Culture Literature (TCL) is awash with fateful experiences, often involving children in international settings, on board boats. TCL is fiction created by Third Culture Kids (TCK), individuals who, due to their parents’ careers, spent a significant part of their formative years outside their passport countries. Raised in many regions, thus in a liminal ‘neither/nor’ space, TCKs frequently reject limiting categorizations in terms of citizenship. Lacking a sense of belonging to a particular country, home for these individuals is not anchored to a place but to a ‘nation-less’ and ‘placeless’ expatriate community. Focusing on the concept of liminality and research on the TCK phenomenon, this article examines how boat travels are adopted in the works of contemporary TCL novelists. It will be argued that floating on international waters, in ‘nation-less’ lands, sea journeys epitomize the critical hypermobile childhood experiences of TCKs and their ‘fluid’ and liminal identities in adulthood. TCK research has been criticized for its Anglo-Americancentric views, and up until today, only novels written in English have been analyzed through the recent TCK lens. In the sea of TCL, I deliberately fished for authors who did not write their works in English. Thus, the sea passages in the two novels Daughter of Fortune, originally written in Spanish by Isabel Allende (who grew up in Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Lebanon) and The Lamentations of Zeno, originally written in German by Ilija Trojanow (who was raised in Bulgaria, Germany and Kenya) are examined in an attempt to further multiplicity at the onset of this innovative literary classification.Downloads
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