Julia Kristeva: "Toccata and Fugue for a Foreigner"

The essay “Toccata and Fugue for a Foreigner” is part of the book “Strangers to ourselves” (1991) by Julia Kristeva, who is a French (immigrant from Bulgaria) philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst.

In this essay, Kristeva points out that the Foreigner is a “hidden face of our identity” and that we should all see ourselves as immigrants – foreigners – in the society and ponders whether one can live with the other on a global scale ‘without levelling’.

She describes what is to be a foreigner, the difficulties, the solitudes and the situations they encounter as being the "other". Plus, she describes the "grey zone", which is when the foreigner no longer belongs to their country nor the new land. "The foreigner belongs nowhere.”

Taking as example what Marjane Satrapi tells about her own experience when she left Iran and went to live in Austria:
“(…) a problem when you go to another culture and you absolutely want to adapt yourself, and you absolutely want to be integrated. (…) You have to take out the first one [culture], and then choose what you want from the two and swallow them again. But it’s the moment you look at everything that it’s this lack of identity. You don’t know anymore who you are. (…) You are a foreigner anywhere.”

In the essay, the foreigner is so well described and so straight forward that I, as a foreigner, found at some points a bit hard to read and see a reflection of me there.

Highlights:

“The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arise, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.” (p. 1)

“Indifference is the foreigner’s shield.” (p.7)

“The space of the foreigner is a moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes stopping.” (p.8)

“(…) nothing binds them here. Always elsewhere, the foreigner belongs nowhere.”

"Occasionally, raising the eyebrows or saying 'I beg your pardon?' in quick succession lead you to understand that you will 'never be part of it'" (p.15)

Nowadays, I believe that more and more people are in the same situation as mentioned in the essay. People are having living experiences in other cultures much more then in earlier years and therefore encountering the same feelings as the foreigner described in this essay.

If, as Kristeva says, we should all see ourselves as foreigners, we also should see everyone as individuals. Different individuals but who share the same feelings. We should not label anyone by where they come from. In mixed cultures this label no longer has meaning, but it just create stereotypes that doesn’t apply to anyone.