week 10 response: on flight & identity

One unanswered question from all my blog posts revolves around the idea of migration and how it challenges identity by troubling its purportedly stable boundaries.

In my week 6 blog post, I wrote about The Warmth of Other Suns and discussed the ways in which the symbolic figure of the migration and leaving becomes an act of resistance to imposed over determining identities. This week I want to delve further into how, when the body is over determined by an identity that is imposed and imprinted onto it, the act of flight and leaving becomes crucial to forging a resistance. Jakeya Caruthers introduced this concept to me in her discussion of The Warmth of Other Suns. Since then, I have read about the symbolic figure of flight in resistance movements, focusing on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and how the flight from the body (or suicide) in the myth known as "the flying African myth" is explored as forging a spiritual freedom --- a travel to the stars --- in resistance to & rejection of the totalising physical effects of slavery, to say that the mind cannot be won.


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