SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

Russian émigré writer Nina Berberova tells a story of domestic embarrassment. Some time in the early 1930s the writer Ivan Bunin paid a visit to Berberova and poet Vladislav Khodasevich in their little flat in the working-class outskirts of Paris that were populated by immigrants. The apartment hardly had any furniture and no particular dinner was served that night. Yet Bunin was irritated by Berberova's precarious domesticity: "'How do you like that! They have an embroidered cock on the teapot!'" exclaimed Bunin once as he entered our dining room. 'Who could have imagined it! Poets, as we all know, live in a ditch, and now it turns out they have a cock on the teapot!'"1 The embroidered cock symbolized a certain intimacy with everyday objects that appeared to be in profoundly bad taste for Russian intellectuals in exile. For Bunin, it was an example of domestic kitsch that compromised the purity of Russian nostalgia. The embroidered cock seemed like a cover-up of exilic pain; it betrayed a desire to inhabit exile, to build a home away from home. Berberova confesses to love that other deliberately chosen and freely inhabited domesticity that "is neither a 'nest' nor biological obligation" but something "warm, pleasant, and becoming to men."2 She did not give up her embroidered teapot, whose decorative cock turned out to be a dangerous exilic bird. This embroidery was a handmade gift sent to Berberova from the Soviet Union by a woman friend who ended up in Siberian exile for having contacts abroad. Hardly an item of domestic kitsch, it was a souvenir of transient, exilic intimacy.

The notion of intimacy is connected to home; intimate means "innermost," "pertaining to . . . one's deepest nature," "very personal," "sexual."3 I will speak about something that might seem paradoxical--a diasporic intimacy that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but constituted by it. In the late twentieth century millions of people find themselves displaced from their places of birth, living in voluntary or involuntary exile. Their intimate experiences occur against a foreign background, where they are aware of the unfamiliar stage set whether they like it or not. Immigrants to the United States, moreover, often bring with them different traditions of social interaction, often less individualistic than those they encounter in their new surroundings. In contemporary American pop psychology one is encouraged "not to be afraid of intimacy," with a presumption that intimate communication can and should be made in plain language. You'd have to feel at home to be intimate, "to say what you mean." Immigrants--and many alienated natives as well--can't help but dread this kind of plain language. To intimate also means "to communicate with a hint or other indirect sign; [to] imply subtly."4 Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets. It is spoken in a foreign language that reveals the inadequacies of translation. Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion but only a precarious affection--no less deep, while aware of its transience. In contrast to the utopian images of intimacy as transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging, diasporic intimacy is dystopian by definition; it is rooted in the suspicion of a single home. It thrives on unpredictable chance encounters, on hope for human understanding. Yet this hope is not utopian. Diasporic intimacy is not limited to the private sphere but reflects collective frameworks of memory that encapsulate even the most personal of dreams. It is haunted by images of home and homeland, yet it also discloses some of the furtive pleasures of exile.

Intimacy has its own historical topography. In the Western tradition it reflects the colonization of the world by a private individual. The maps of intimacy expand through the centuries: from precarious medieval retreats--a corner by the window or in the hallway, a secluded spot behind the orchard, a forest clearing--to the ostentatious bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century, with their innumerable curio cabinets and chests of drawers, to the end of the twentieth century's transitory locations--the back seat of a car, a train compartment, an airport bar, a home page on the Web. It might appear that intimacy is on the outskirts of the social; it is local and particular, socially superfluous and noninstrumental. Yet, for better or for worse, each romance with intimacy is adulterated by a specific culture and society. The revulsion against the embroidered cock on the teapot might surprise an American reader for whom the pursuit of domestic happiness goes together with spiritual fulfillment, not in opposition to it. While intimate experiences are personal and singular, the maps of intimate sites are socially recognizable; they are encoded as refuges of the individual.5 Intimacy is not solely a private matter; it may be protected, manipulated or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory, or estranged by critique.

1. Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York, 1991), p. 338. Historically, the term émigré has referred to political exiles. Hence, it would apply to Berberova and the Soviet exiles who came to the United States as refugees and till glasnost could never go back. However, my discussion of diasporic intimacy has broader implications and in this context I use the terms immigrants, exiles, and émigrés interchangeably. It is not within the scope of my paper to discuss the social, political, and economic differences among them (which are often far from obvious: not all émigrés belonged to the upper or middle class, and not all immigrants are poor). It should be noted however that exiles and émigrés usually cannot go back "home." Diasporic intimacy is an inclusive rather than an exclusive category. For further inspiring discussion of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, homeland, and immigrant poetics see the journal Diaspora and Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York, 1990).

2. Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, p. 338.

3. American Heritage Dictionary, s.v. "intimate."

4. Ibid. 5. See Philippe Ariès, introduction to Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 3:1Ð7, and Orest Ranum, "The Refuges of Intimacy," in A History of Private Life, 3; 207-63.

Svetlana Boym is professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991), and of the play and film The woman Who Shot Lenin. She is currently working on a book on nostalgia.