Madagascar: the Initiating Liminal Space
Going to Madagascar is not true exile. Mathi dreams of leaving Taiwan to find its “mirrored” other as if from this quest she could finally come upon a true identity and apparently solve her own problems. It is not the escapism or the abandonment of the past time and space that features and nourishes her dream. To pass this liminal stage, Mathi is to experience “the betwixt-and-between state of liminality” and “the state of outsiderhood, referring to the condition of being either permanently and by ascription set
outside the structural arrangements of a given social system” (Turner 1974, 232-233) and as passing through a symbolic domain she is supposed to obtain something beyond her previous ken of knowledge.
But during this liminal phase, Mathi begins to experience “the betwixt-and-between” as a complex of familiarity and foreignness—the past and the present, Taiwan and Madagascar start to mix with each other. They reveal to Mathi an experience of ambiguity. She fails to feel an identity of her own, because her marginal position forbids her identifying with either Madagascar or Taiwan. When her watch is out of order in her aimless traveling in this wild barren land, Mathi begins to feel a sense of loss, not knowing precisely whether it is time for sunrise or sunset. Mathi thus reflects upon her life in Taiwan:
People there [Taiwan] have plenty of things, but lack time and space. People here have nearly nothing, not even a watch, so they have plenty of time. Humans are seeds, being sown here, or there. . . . What is unchangeable is that people here and there all have to find a way of survival individually. (Chu 304-305)
Nevertheless, whether with or without the pressure from modern culture and identity, Mathi finds out quite ironically that after leaving all the burdens attached to her old identity, and wandering all alone for so many months in this strange place, she could still feel the stifling feeling of suffocation—a testimony of her affinity with Taiwan.
In her aimless wandering on this great land, Mathi finally meets “Jesus”
in the desert near the great plateau and begins her practice of self-made enlightenment as his silent travel companion and a novice. She does not speak to him but determines to follow him until she learns the secret of serenity and
freedom. In the beginning, Mathi tries to imitate his way of walking as if she could only demonstrate her sincerity and courtesy by following the great master’s footsteps. “Jesus” keeps walking, but would suddenly take a ninety-degree turn on the plateau, as if he were walking on an invisible road.
Mathi follows behind him as if she were practicing a certain kind of ceremony.
Mathi finally finds out after a period of time that the pleasure of this walking style is you don’t have to go in a straight line all the way, which is quite absurd when there is really no road on this great plateau, and since you could always make a good turn when you have no mood to go on the same straight line, you could make a little fun out of this pure walking. It is not because there is any significance in this kind of walking, Mathi thinks, but because you have a sudden impulse to take a turn (Chu 317).
This kind of walking style in fact is not new in the story narrative.
Before Mathi falls down on the street in Taipei after she runs away from her classmate’s wedding ceremony, she unconsciously walks in this very style.
She first walks straight down the street. When a red light appears, she turns left or right. This is the way that Mathi walks across half of Taipei. During that time, she dares not stop, for she cannot help beginning to reflect upon all the failures in her life and to face the problems she can not solve (Chu 2).
Here, in Madagascar, “Jesus” adopts the same kind of walking, and quite to the contrary, he uses it to face his own self and the problem of life and death.
One day when accompanying “Jesus” on board to sail to another town, Mathi pleads with “Jesus” to help save a big fish caught by fishermen. “Jesus”
refuses. Another day, while trooping alone in the desert, Mathi finds a village plagued by an unknown disease. Mathi cries to “Jesus” (who practices Chinese acupuncture to heal some aboriginal habitants in another town) to at least try helping some of the villagers. Once again, “Jesus” gives no notice or response to her cry. She is terribly shocked to find out the cruelty and cold
indifference “Jesus” shows to human beings and animals. She wonders why the aborigines in Madagascar call such a merciless man “Jesus.” However, the true understanding of “Jesus” dawns upon Mathi when finally the opportunity comes for her to really change her perspective. As Mathi accompanies
“Jesus,” climbing higher and higher up the rock mountain, she gradually comes to the understanding that “Jesus” preserves.
The higher she climbs, the farther away she is from the dead village.
Now, when she reaches the mountaintop, she sees quite a different view. For the first time she could see more than the image of the dead village. The world is more than just a dead village—farther beyond the dead village, she sees a great group of desert plants growing vigorously. Together they unite into a huge unit, like a green arm, approaching slowly but firmly coming over the site of the dead village. The location of the ruin without doubt contains the water these plants most need. Mathi suddenly finds: “For human beings, the ruin is a destitute place; in the wildness, this is another prosperous land of water and greens” (Chu 353).
In the first part of the novel, Mathi takes a bird’s eye view of Taipei, and finds it to be a terrible pressure cooker. In Taiwan, the bird’s eye view does not help her understand the secret lying within the locality of Taipei, but in Madagascar, the bird’s eye view helps her understand the secret of life. In Taipei, she is trapped by her own thinking process, and is too deep and too emerged in troubles so that she cannot see all the troubles from a distance and look into the mystic significance of life. In the second part of the novel, Mathi first adopts a new perspective of a flâneur strolling on the plateau of Madagascar and changes her previous detached attitude which is completely based upon her own concept as a lonely divorced woman under great social and economic pressure from a modern capitalistic society. She experiences there on the Madagascar plateau the company of a dog, yet sadly realizes that
she, too, like the dog who follows her everywhere for food and refuses to leave her when finally she and “Jesus” have to board a ship for another town, has an invisible chain that connects her to the company on road, and it is this chain that prevents her ubiquitously from walking the road to freedom. There is no escape from the food chain that controls all species on earth. The dog clings to her for food and company, and the fishermen need to catch fish to survive. Hence, she has the first taste of understanding of the concept of God (or certain deity). He does not shed tears for the death of a fish but takes in a whole view of the possible consequences where the life and death of a creature is part of the chain of being.
Moreover, she experiences strong hatred towards “Jesus” for his not even making an effort to rescue the dying villagers, and therefore, bitterly witnesses the complete extinction of the whole village suffering from an unnamable plague. However, “Jesus” guides her to look down from high above the dead village, whose site in the very near future would become a nourishing oasis for wild plants and other living species. Nature reveals to Mathi the secrets of life and death. Quite different from her past mode of interpretation, Mathi for the first time tries not to understand and interpret the scene from a human being’s perspective. To let a whole village be extinguished is a great sin. Under that charge, “Jesus” deserves Mathi’s hatred and condemnation. However, if other species besides human beings are taken into consideration, the dying out of a human village is but part of the whole celestial scheme, for this huge scale of death provides other species—the plants and other animals outside the village—with a chance of living. Death is closely tied up with the burgeoning of new life.
With a focus on the concern of “the mutually constitutive relationships between persons and the environments in which they live and work,”
Penelope Harvey contends that the relationship between human beings and
landscape should be examined “in terms of human capacity to view, survey and map the territories in which they live, imposing meanings on particular landforms or determining land use through the activities done to or on the land” (197). Not taking into consideration the impact that human beings’ use of the land might have on the lives of the other species (be they animals or plants) brings forth biases and misguided understandings. Through a single-minded geographer’s knowledge, a landscape so textualized perfectly represents a homogeneous interpretation, even though it does arrogantly abolish other heterogeneous elements in interpreting the landscape and the diversities it represents. However, such a reading of space can tolerate no heterogeneities, not to mention the pursuit of liberation and revolution against the regulations of the social relation and value system.
“The reading of the signs that the landscape affords is less like the reading of a map and more akin to how one might try to interpret the feelings of others by looking at facial expressions and bodily postures” (Penelope Harvey 198). Resisting the homogeneous cartographer’s perspective, Penelope Harvey reads the landscape in terms of the interrelationship between human beings and the personhood of hills and pathways, with an attempt to avoid merely taking into concern the simple concept of tradition or cultural otherness. Mathi’s understanding of the landscape from the plateau can be understood in part from Penelope Harvey’s interpretation of the “animate landscape,” and in part, from the non-interference concept that traditional Chinese philosophers (Laozi and Zhuangzi as the two most eminent advocators) interpret and understand how God (or an all-mighty deity) would rule the world.
Through the death of the fish and the extinction of the village in Madagascar, Mathi comes closer to the mind of “Jesus.” What really counts and matters when viewed from a higher level need not be well conceived by
the human mind. The sympathy that human beings possess can only extend to the beings that are the closest to them; however, what nature broods over might not be the life and death of a single fish, or the extinction of a destitute village, but the rotation of life and death of different species—for in the circle of life and death, being human is but one possibility, and not particularly favored when compared with other forms of existence. When viewed from the perspective of God, every event would reveal quite a different aspect: life or death is nothing to be worried about, and turbulent conflicts are no longer troublesome.
If universalism and uniformity are what trouble Mathi most in her pursuit of a career, and if just as Kevin Robins points out, these two positions are “associated with a crisis of urbanity,” then Robins’ concept about the postmodern city might provide a new light to the interpretation of Mathi’s Taipei experiences: we need to adopt “an attempt to re-imagine urbanity,” so as to recover “a lost sense of territorial identity, urban community and public space” (304). This is also part of the resolution Mathi achieves through her personal experience in Madagascar.
It is the burgeoning of the tactile process of initiation that gradually incorporates Mathi into the ultra-commonsensical concept of deity. Mathi’s journey to Madagascar finally shows some possibility of passing the liminal phase. In exchange for her earthly fortunes, Mathi gains peacefulness instead.
The cognitive voyage into the Madagascar plateau and the several months of apprenticeship under “Jesus” provide the duty-bound yet duty-averted Mathi with the chance of transformation:
On the mountaintop, Mathi realized that the meaning of life lay not in questing answers, for an answer was but the question of another answer; life lay in understanding and experiencing, no
matter where life was. (Chu 358-359)
Madagascar is the place where Mathi finds out the meaning of life; however, instead of staying there, Mathi determines to return home to keep on living.
Different places set up different kinds of lives, and every life has its own inherent limitations and restrictions. Confined by their location, people are doomed to experience whatever their unique life brings forth. As bell hooks states, “I had to leave that space I called home to move beyond boundaries, yet I needed also to return there” (205). When reflecting upon her whole life, Mathi finds out that she is like the dog refusing to leave her and live independently in the Madagascar desert. Once chained by the living process, one would turn docile, and know only the techniques of surrender. She had neither the courage nor the imagination to break the chain when she was in Taipei. It is she herself that resists freedom (Chu 339). The initiation into the concept of a possible non-interference belonging to God (or the all-mighty deity) now at last dawns upon her. She now can finally reflect upon the possibility of light in a human life and the non-interference God possesses to treat all the species on earth.
Re-integrating the newfound balance that bears no hatred to anyone’s not offering a helping hand and no great sorrow for the death of any species, Mathi passes the liminality and completes the last phase of the rites of passage.
She realizes that the meaning of life lies not in the quest of an answer, nor is it to be found in any escape from suffering and pressure. Death or life, sorrow or joy, are but fragments belonging to a larger whole. She feels that she comes closer to “Jesus” and gets to understand his world-view gradually. And that is the time Mathi makes her resolution to go back to Taipei—to re-enter and re-unite into her cultural and social home/land. From this perspective, Madagascar or Taipei makes no great difference to Mathi now. The two spaces
still bear their geographical, economical and cultural differences as well as similarities; however, Mathi knows that as a human being she has her road to walk on. Reinsertion into the world she comes from will not provoke any stir of shock or churning nausea in her this time, for there is a thoughtful yet concrete determination to live through and experience whatever comes forth to her.
Even though at last she cannot return to her hometown alive as she, without a second thought, rushes out from the rocks to save “Jesus’s” life under the Madagascar tribal militiaman’s bullet, she practices what she learns from the transition rites in Madagascar—the mystic experience of and the epiphany of death, life and inter-subjective relationships of all beings on earth.
Mathi’s tour of rites of passage, though failing to really bring her back to her home/land, does bring her into another kind of understanding. She finally reaches a relatively stable state and can examine her social and spatial position in this life/world in the context of inter-subjectivity. By sacrificing her life to save “Jesus,” Mathi demonstrates her new understanding and practices it with all her body and mind, with her affect and cognition, to prove that she has really learned the true spirit of “Jesus’s” practice of mortification—the quest of true self-identity and subjectivity that harmoniously joins and shares the inter-subjective relationships in context.
Subjectivity reveals itself while “[i]ntensity shocks the subject into experiencing its own aliveness and vitality, generating a sharp sense of its own embodied relation to the world.” (Fullagar 68) In Mathi’s case, this intensity of the affect reconnects her to the world which demands love and sacrifice as an exchange for freedom and unboundedness, and allows her identity and subjectivity to shine out of the limits of self as she crosses over the liminal space where life and death intermingle.
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