Arrested motion and future-mourning: Hybridity and creativity

Abstract

Melancholy seems always to have had a bad press. In this essay I explore the ways in which the expression of negativity, ambivalence and dissonance in melancholy influenced and shaped my writing. Much of this melancholia stemmed from transplantation and dissonance and from the need to make oneself heard in a host country whose blindness to alterity ran parallel to an identitarian politics framed by exclusion. When a nation is unable to mourn its history, writers tend to be paralysed, being unable to detach themselves from a nation-building canon. I investigate melancholia as a productive agentin employing critique to produce counter-traditions and to offer resistance to dominant ideologies. I focus on writing in order to explore distinctive moments when melancholia, expressed in forms ranging from dissimulation to irony, played a decisive role in my writing career.