Wandering Stories, Becoming Subjects: The Nomadic Position in Amalia Kahana-Carmon's Writing

• In Event: New Readings in Modern Hebrew Fiction

Abstract

The protagonists in Amalia Kahana-Carmon's work wander between inter-Israeli and trans-national spaces. They also fluctuate in the inter-narrative space and sometimes move from one work to another; The protagonist of a novel, or of a collection of stories, "wander" into a novella, which, in its turn, is itself made up of previous stories, while their new location modifies their character. Thus modular practice of destructuring and restructuring, which is present in Kahana-Carmon's work ever since her very early writing, is manifest, in its widest scope, in her next-to-last book, her collection of novels, "Here We'll Live" (1996).
In this lecture I shall assess this practice and will argue that it produces nomadic poetics in which center stands a subject in a perpetual process of self-construction. In the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti's terminology (following Deleuze and Guattari), the nomadic subject is propelled by a desire for an unstable identity. Unlike a displaced emigrant, and unlike an immigrant moving from one fixed point in space to another, the nomadic subject takes instability as a way of life, and an ethical existence in a world of diversity and difference.
I shall argue that the subject standing in the epicenter of Amalia Kahana-Carmon's narrative unit, as well as the trans-narrative subject, perpetually recreates herself in relation to the space (geographical, human, narrative) in which she is located. I shall demonstrate that her tendency to create for herself a home in any place – both physically and lingually – opens up even for Kahana-Carmon's most "passive" protagonists the option to liberate themselves in another narrational context.
A common stand in current research identifies the crystallization of the feminist moment in Kahana-Carmon's relatively-late book, "Up in Montipher", also as a result of the development of her writing over time. I propose that Kahana-Camon's modular practice should be regarded as a feminist poetic-ethical stance present in her work ever since its beginning.

author

• TAMAR MISHMAR, HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM