a life in the sun: accounts of new lives abroad as intercultural narratives

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This article was downloaded by: [University of York] On: 08 October 2014, At: 11:11 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Language and Intercultural Communication Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmli20 A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New Lives Abroad as Intercultural Narratives Tita Beaven a a Faculty of Education and Language Studies , The Open University , UK Published online: 22 Dec 2008. To cite this article: Tita Beaven (2007) A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New Lives Abroad as Intercultural Narratives, Language and Intercultural Communication, 7:3, 188-202, DOI: 10.2167/laic181.0 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/laic181.0 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New Lives Abroad as Intercultural Narratives

This article was downloaded by: [University of York]On: 08 October 2014, At: 11:11Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Language and Intercultural CommunicationPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmli20

A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New LivesAbroad as Intercultural NarrativesTita Beaven aa Faculty of Education and Language Studies , The Open University , UKPublished online: 22 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Tita Beaven (2007) A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New Lives Abroad as InterculturalNarratives, Language and Intercultural Communication, 7:3, 188-202, DOI: 10.2167/laic181.0

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/laic181.0

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in thispublication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsedby Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liablefor any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: A Life in the Sun: Accounts of New Lives Abroad as Intercultural Narratives

A Life in the Sun: Accounts ofNew Lives Abroad as InterculturalNarratives

Tita BeavenFaculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University, UK

Through an analysis of three settler narratives about new lives in Spain, Stewart(1999), Kerr (2000) and Lambert (2000), the paper explores three elements of theseintercultural narratives that contribute to the formation of the settler’s new socio-cultural identity: the physical environment, explorations of the other through signsof the settler’s adaptation and the redefinitions of the self this interculturalencounter often implies.

A traves del analisis de tres relatos que narran las nuevas vidas de sus autores enEspana, Stewart (1999), Kerr (2000), y Lambert (2000), este artıculo explora treselementos de estas narraciones interculturales que contribuyen a la formacion de lanueva identidad sociocultural de sus autores: el entorno fısico, las exploraciones delotro a traves de los signos de adaptacion, y las nuevas definiciones de uno mismoque este tipo de encuentro intercultural suele conllevar.

doi: 10.2167/laic181.0

Keywords: intercultural narrative, intercultural communication, travelwriting, identity, constructions of Spain

IntroductionThis paper examines aspects of three narratives that relate contemporary

experiences of British writers in Spain in the light of intercultural contact:Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons, An Optimist in Andalucıa (1999), PeterKerr’s Snowball Oranges, One Mallorcan Winter (2000) and Derek Lambert’sSpanish Lessons, Beginning a New Life in Spain (2000). These narratives are readas examples of what I have termed ‘settler narrative’, a type of immigrantwriting within the complex genre of travel literature.

Settlers’ stories are essentially about the interplay between cultures; theydescribe the author’s willing and (more or less) permanent move to anotherworld, and reveal the effect that intercultural experience has on the author’ssense of identity. These texts offer the reader the possibility of imagining a lifeabroad. They create a space which, in the words of Appadurai (1996: 4), is not‘easily bound within local, national or regional spaces’. These books are about‘over there’, but always mediated by ‘one of us’, for our own consumption.They are, however, inevitably also about ‘over here’, although their authors areno longer ‘one of us’, as their experiences in the other culture have inevitablychanged them. The space they create is an imaginary space in which the readercan envisage themselves in another culture through mediated encounters with

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the other in an array of situations, from the quotidian to the exceptional. Assuch, they define, as Appadurai (1996) puts it, some of the building blocks ofnew Spanish ‘imagined worlds’.

Travel NarrativesTravel narratives have been described as autobiographical texts based on

‘the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data’ (Fussell, 1980: 203); asa kind of narrative that recounts the ‘travel writer’s desire to mediate betweenthings foreign and things familiar, to help us understand that world which isother to us’ (Blanton, 2002: 2). However, this mediation is clearly nottransparent as travel writing is also a form of story telling; as such, it makesrecourse to the tropes of the genre, such as the journey as a metaphor for life,travelling as a journey of self-discovery, etc. It is very much influenced byother genres, such as the comic novel, the picaresque and the pastoralromance. Typically it narrates a story that has the hero ‘setting out,experiencing trials and adventure, and returning home victorious andchanged’ (Dann, 1999: 163�164). As Blanton (2002: 5) succinctly puts it:

Among the chief characteristics [of travel writing] are a narrator/traveller who travels for the sake of travel itself; a narrative style thatborrows from fiction in its use of rising and falling action, character, andsetting; a conscious commitment to represent the strange and exotic inways that both familiarize and distance the foreign; a writerly concernwith language and literature; and finally, thematic concerns that gobeyond descriptions of people and places visited.

In addition to the use of those mechanisms that blur reality and fiction, wehave been warned about the ideological dimension frequently implicit intravel literature, i.e. a predominant etic perspective that wraps around anyemic views (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1998; Duncan & Gregory, 1999). Travelwriting is often inherently domesticating, in something like Venuti’s sense(2000), and many critics have emphasised its complicity with the play ofcolonising power. But even in its most imperial gestures, by virtue of itsoccupation of that ‘space in-between’ � the space of transculturation (Pratt,1992) � travel writing can also disclose ambivalence, a sense of its ownauthority and assumptions being called into question (Duncan & Gregory,1999: 5).

It has been acknowledged that travel writing is a genre notoriously difficultto describe (Cocker, 1992; Dann, 1999; Fussell, 1980). A main difficulty, in myview, is that it refers to the narratives of three main types of traveller: tourist,sojourner, immigrant (Dann, 1999). Each of these types encompasses a varietyof individuals with diverse purposes in mind: leisure, study, retirement orwork. But, most importantly, the writers travel to the ‘alien’ territory either toreturn home (transients) or to stay (residents), and the combination of thesespace and time dimensions is what makes their journeys and experiences, andtherefore the style and content of their writings, so diverse. This distinctionbetween each type of narrative according to the circumstances of the traveller

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allows us to identify a number of subgenres within travel narratives: tourist,sojourner and immigrant narratives.

For example, Laurie Lee’s classic, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning(1969), can be classified as the one of a tourist traveller, someone who ‘found’himself in his journey across Spain and returned home to tell his story.Miranda France’s account of her sojourn in Spain as a student and her returnto the country some years later, Don Quixote’s Delusions, Travels in CastilianSpain (2002), represents a typical sojourner narrative, mixing the author’spersonal narrative with accounts and meditations on the country’s history,society and culture. Immigrant narrative, on the other hand, tends toconcentrate more on the trauma of settling in what is often an alien worldprejudiced against the new arrivals. Lavapies. Microrelatos (2001), a collection ofshort stories that recount the experiences of immigrants in the eponymousmulticultural district of Madrid, is a recent Spanish addition to the genre.

However, there is also a very different kind of immigrant who has a strongdesire to move and live abroad. Unlike the displaced peoples mentionedabove, these writers, such as Stewart (1999), Kerr (2000) and Lambert (2000),represent a sort of immigrant who voluntarily opts to live in a foreign land.They are similar to the protagonists of the reality TV shows that follow Britishfamilies who emigrate in search of a better life in the sun, such as Channel 4’sNo Going Back series, or the BBC’s A Life in the Sun . These settlers, as I shall callthem, are not sojourners like students or business travellers, neither are theypolitical exiles or economic migrants. They travel to settle abroad, knowingthat they are leaving behind most of the certainties of their lives, andconsciously and deliberately looking forward to a new environment thatwill irrevocably transform them.

These settler narratives and the lived experiences they portray can be readas Appaduraian ‘landscapes’: on the one hand, the moving groups of peoplesthat constitute what he has termed the ‘ethnoscape’ have an unprecedentedeffect on both host and home nations, and in the relationship between the two;although the communities to which these people belong may still beconsidered stable, they are ‘shot through with the woof of human motion,as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move and thefantasies of wanting to move’ (Appadurai, 1996: 33�34). On the other hand,settler accounts contribute their repertoires of images and narratives aboutboth the old and the new worlds to the ‘mediascapes’, ‘image-centered,narrative based accounts of strips of reality’ which offer ‘those who experienceand transform them [ . . .] a series of elements (such as characters, plots, andtextual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their ownas well as those of others living in other places’ (Appadurai, 1996: 35). AsAppadurai goes on to observe, these scripts of imagined lives are transformedinto ‘complex sets of metaphors by which people live, as they help toconstitute narratives of the Other and protonarratives of possible lives,fantasies that could become prolegomena to the desire of acquisition andmovement’ (Appadurai, 1996: 35�36). And, as will become apparent, some ofthe elements in these narratives of other lives come to constitute, as Urry putsit, ‘a closed self-perpetuating system of illusions’ (Urry, 2002: 7), whichinevitably helps to construct the reader’s imagined world. The reading

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I propose is situated within a constructivist perspective, so that the narrativerepresentations of people and places partly describe an, albeit narratised, livedreality, and partly help to construct the ideologically preferred versions of theSpanish ‘imagined worlds’ prevalent in the ‘life in the sun’ mediascapes.

Learning from Intercultural ContactsThere are many kinds of first-hand accounts of ‘intercultural personhood’

(Kim, 2001); indeed, all forms of travel narrative reveal aspects of interculturalcontact. In fact travel writing might be considered the intercultural narrativepar excellence, as it is about ‘the interplay between observer and observed,between a traveller’s own philosophical biases and preconceptions and thetest those ideas and prejudices endure as a result of the journey’ (Blanton,2002: 5). Travel writers frequently deal implicitly or explicitly with aspects ofcross-cultural adaptation such as adjustment, assimilation, acculturation andintegration (Kim, 2001). But the narration in travel writing also provides anopportunity for the author to re-examine themselves. As Freeman (2003: 127)has explained:

the narrated life is the examined life , where one steps out from the flow ofthings and seeks to become more conscious of one’s existence. [ . . .]autobiographical narratives are not only about what happened when,how these happenings might be emplotted, and so forth, but also abouthow to live and whether the life is a good one.

Among all kinds of travel writing, for evident reasons, settler writing inparticular tends to elaborate more in depth on the concepts related to cross-cultural adaptation. The travelling experience itself in these books is indeedoften marginal, usually a brief episode at the start of the narratives; the mainconcern of the texts is actually to highlight and explore the encounter with theother culture. Whether settlers end up staying permanently or not, theysubscribe to what migration experts have termed the myth of no-return(O’Reilly, 2002), and hence moves towards adapting to their new surroundingsare seen as paramount. Therefore, their narratives typically expose, in the firstinstance, issues of culture shock such as conflict and stress in the process ofintercultural adjustments (see Matsumoto et al ., 2003) as well as other morepositive instances of the experience.

In reading settler writings the reader witnesses how the act of settling downin a new surrounding enables the fashioning of hybrid identities, whichencompass the old and the new, the self and the other; that is, the reader isintroduced to the fluidity of cultural identities and to how a new, third culturecan be built (see Casmir, 1999; Chen & Starosta, 1998).

I would now like to look in particular at three elements of the repertoires ofimages that form part of the mediascape of accounts of new lives in Spain, asillustrated in the three intercultural narratives that are the basis of this study(Kerr, 2000; Lambert, 2000; Stewart, 1999). These three elements, whichcontribute to the formation of the settlers’ new sociocultural identities, are:the physical environment in which they find themselves (constructions ofSpain and Britain); the Other (signs of adaptation); and the self (Britishness).

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Constructions of Spain and BritainLike ethnographic accounts of other settlers in the coastal regions of Spain,

the three settler narratives that are taken as examples in this paper deal withwhat migration experts call push and pull factors: elements that describenegative aspects to life in Britain, and elements which describe Spain in apositive light (O’Reilly, 2002: 25).

Sojourners who intend to return home create an idealised view of thehomeland, while settlers, in order to feel attachment and belonging in theforeign country, subscribe to the myth of no-return, and ‘seek to explode anyromantic or positive images of Britain’ (O’Reilly, 2002: 98). Thus, one of thediscourses produced by settlers is the one articulated around the notions of‘Bad Britain’ and ‘Good Spain’, where Britain often signifies

routine; dullness; monotony; greyness; cold; no hope for the future; amiserable old age; misery; modern life; rushing around; no time forpleasure; crime; selfishness; lack of caring; loss of community; lack oftrust; poor health; poor education; and a poor welfare state. (O’Reilly,2002: 99)

and Spain is constructed as a site to be valued for its

natural resources, including climate and landscape, things offered by thesettled British community (clubs, leisure, a welcoming community) andthings offered by the Spanish community (respect for children and theelderly, friendliness, warmth, security and a slow pace of life). (O’Reilly,2002: 26)

Each of these idealised elements can be found in the settler narratives(Figure 1); however, although these constructions can be read as an indicationof acceptance and valuing of the foreign environment (which, in turn, it is apositive sign of adaptability), they need to be looked at more critically asimbalanced perceptions of the two worlds. That said, on many occasions the‘real’ seems to find its way through the descriptions of the ideal, revealingaspects of the environment that help to define a more accurate, or at least lessromanticised, picture. As we will later see, clear examples of this are therecognition of unexpected similarities between the two worlds as well as thepresentation of evidence of negative discoveries.

Firstly, I will examine how different aspects of Spain’s natural resources aredefined as opposite to those of Britain. In the texts I have analysed there is anabundance of comparisons between the two: for example, the following extractfrom Chris Stewart’s book draws on the ideas of natural beauty versusdreariness and routine:

We wound down the path through the oranges and almonds and outinto the riverbed where we scuffed among the hot rocks and splashedthrough the river. The sun blazed down on us from a cloudless sky. Ineuphoric mood I found myself musing on the idea of waiting in the colddrizzle of an early morning railway station with hundreds of otherbesuited businessmen, waiting for the daily ride to the treadmill.

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‘Whatever comes of this decision’, I thought, ‘it has to be better thanthat.’ (Stewart, 1999: 39)

The differences between the natural resources in ‘Bad Britain’ and ‘GoodSpain’ are both highlighted and questioned when they are subverted, as in thepassage from the opening pages of Snowball Oranges , which sees the Kerrsarriving in their new home in Mallorca, to be greeted, much to their dismay, by‘a rare sight of snow falling from Mediterranean skies [ . . .] Surely we hadn’tmigrated fifteen hundred miles southwards only to be followed by the samefreezing weather which we had just left behind?’ (Kerr, 2000: 7). An even moredirect questioning of this fictional idealisation comes from Derek Lambert’syoung Canadian son, when they too are surprised by an unexpected blizzard:‘Spain isn’t so different from Canada, is it?’ (Lambert, 2000: 39).

A second element of the positive construction of Spain in this kind ofnarrative suggested by O’Reilly is what the settled British community has to

Good Spain Bad Britain

Natural resources DrearinessThe country

Natural beauty Routine, dullness

Family values Lack of strong family

ties

Sense of community Loss of community

The people

Simplicity:

-wholesome and natural

life

-use of language

-golden past: timeless

Fussy and superfluous

life

Negativeelements ofSpain

Positiveelements ofBritain

Figure 1 Constructions of Spain and Britain

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offer. There is evidence in the settlers’ accounts that the authors and theirfamilies rely on and find help and support from some of their compatriots. Forinstance, Chris Stewart writes about the help they received from Georgina, ‘aconfident young Englishwoman with a peculiar Mediterranean way ofseeming at ease with her surroundings [ . . . who] had carved out a niche forherself acting as an intermediary between the farmers who wanted to sell theircortijos . . . and the foreigners who wanted to buy them’ (Stewart, 1999: 1); healso, for instance, mentions a British couple who acted ‘as guides through thearcane web of Spanish administration for other foreigners buying property inthe area’ (Stewart, 1999: 140). It is a recognition that they are not alone indealing with the Other. However, it is also clear that the relationship with theircompatriots is a complex one, as the authors explicitly want to distancethemselves from other British settlers as well as from the visitors in the touristareas and from the ghettoised expat communities. Although this is an issue Iwill address in more detail in the final section of this paper, I would like topoint out here that this rejection of their own cultural group seems necessaryfor their narratives, as it contributes to their idealised construction of theforeign cultural group to which they aspire to belong.

A third factor mentioned by O’Reilly in the construction of the ‘Good Spain’narrative is that of the positive elements offered by the Spanish communityand, in this respect, the recurring themes in her ethnographic study are thoseof family values, a sense of community and a simple way of life, particularlyemphasised in the rural environment.

This ‘imagined community’ is also present in the settler narratives, whereSpain too emerges as the site in which ‘old people and children werecherished’ (Lambert, 2000: 33), and the comparison of family values is alwaysto the detriment of Britain. Kerr (2000: 103), for instance, says of his ownmother:

I’m sure that old granny would rather be here [ . . .] than sitting at homealone, watching the telly like so many families leave their oldies to do inour country. We should take a leaf out of the Spanish book.

One aspect of the sense of community is the importance of neighbourliness,and anecdotes demonstrating this characteristic proliferate in the narratives.For instance, the Kerrs are caught short not having realised that they would beunable to get any firewood delivered over the Christmas period, and aneighbour gives them some of his own. ‘‘‘Hombre , what are neighbours for?’’,he grinned. ‘‘I may not be a rich man, but what little I have is yours � if everyou are in need.’’’ (Kerr, 2000: 169). Similarly, one of Stewarts’ Britishneighbours says of one of the valley’s Spanish inhabitants: ‘He’s helped meout when I’ve had a problem no end of times, generous with his time andalways good for a laugh. Mind you, I’ve helped him out too’ (Stewart, 1999:32). The locals, in fact, often take on the role of mentors, falling ‘naturally intothe role of guide, introducing [the newly arrived settler] to [his] new world ofvillages and mountains . . . ’ (Stewart, 1999: 82), or ‘taking [him] under hiswing � letting [him] know that he understood and cared’ (Kerr, 2000: 129).The neighbours are the ‘observed individuals’, rather than the homogenisedethnic group, and as such are the ‘perfectly transparent’ token community

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representatives (Galasinski & Jaworski, 2003: 133), which are the prototypicalembodiment of the Spanish characteristics that are so admired.

Another valued aspect of living in rural Spain that is mentioned in thesettler narratives is its simplicity, one which harks back to a straightforward,timeless way of conducting one’s life, a trope of the discourse common tomuch travel writing (Galasinski & Jaworski, 2003: 135). It is a simple existence,as opposed to the unduly complicated life in Britain; it is wholesome andnatural, where Britain is fussy and superfluous. When they start unloading thethings they have brought from England for their new life in the Alpujarranmountains, Stewart grows self-conscious in front of one of the local ‘peasants’:

‘It’s a thing for slicing eggs . . . an asparagus kettle. That? Oh that’s a tea-cosy . . . for keeping tea-pots warm . . . a device for applying rubberrings to the balls of lambs, a pepper-mill, a food-processor . . . a word-processor . . . ’ I felt more and more abashed as, with my explanations, Ilaid bare the fripperies of our existence. It seemed somehow wantingwhen compared with the elemental earthiness of his. (Stewart, 1999: 58)

Simplicity is also exemplified by the locals’ relation to the world around themin the austere and down-to-earth way they use language. For instance, Kerr’sneighbour calls his dog Perro, the Spanish word for dog (Kerr, 2000: 161), andwhen Chris Stewart asks a neighbour what his horse is called, he replies:

‘Brown.’‘Brown?’‘Brown. It’s a brown horse’, said Pedro absently.One of the dogs was called Brown too; it was a brown dog. (Stewart,1999: 39)

Spain is seen in a positive light because it is what Britain is imagined to havebeen like in the past, a romantic feeling highlighted by O’Reilly in her study ofidentity amongst the British in the Costa del Sol (O’Reilly, 2002: 115). However,if Spain represents an unchanged, unmodernised society, this can sometimeshave slightly menacing connotations. Spain’s own past is also a recurringtheme, and there are numerous references to various ‘sinister’ aspects. Forinstance, the writers reveal the grotesque, the macabre, the barbaric, ‘darkside’ of Spain: the ubiquitous bull fighting, poor treatment of animals,gruesome tales of the matanza (the slaughter of the pigs), and even theforeignness of the food: for instance, Pedro, who owns the farm Chris Stewartis buying, likes to eat ‘strong food’:

Strong food in these parts is chickens’ heads, ham fat, pig’s bloodpudding, raw peppers and garlic, chumbos (prickly pear), stale bread andwine. [ . . . ]. This was Pedro’s preferred diet. He offered me a chicken’shead one morning, a ghastly-looking burnt thing with charred featherson it that he had taken from the fire, waving it under my nose with agrin.

‘Strong food for the guest of honour!’ (Stewart, 1999: 35)

These are the elements that perhaps best signal the separation between ‘us’and ‘them’. And, as previously stated, these unexpected revelations in the

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construction of the two realities are critical for preparing the readers with theirmediated encounter with the Other.

Signs of AdaptationThe extent travellers choose to relate to the Other is another important

identity-defining element in travel narratives. Cross-cultural adaptation isindeed one of the main identity discourses both in ethnographic studies and insettler narratives. An examination of the signs of adaptation revealed in thesestories can clarify the different impacts the proximity to the cultural othershave on the authors’ identities.

In spite of the odd romanticised construct, such as Antonia, the energetic,generous Dutch sculptor, who is ‘the only foreigner I know here who simplyby being true to herself has become a part of the Alpujarra’ (Stewart, 1999:196), the adaptation process is not represented in the settler narratives in asimplistic way, but in all its complexity. Casmir (1999: 106) has linked theconcept of cultural adaptation to ‘individuals’ needs to survive physically,emotionally or intellectually’, which Ward and Kennedy (1999) have thenlabelled the domain of the psychological (emotional/affective) and the domainof the sociocultural (behavioural) complemented by ‘cultural empathy’.Adaptation to the realities of the Other involves skills, attitudes, knowledgeand awareness, and these texts can be read as exemplars of (more or lesssuccessful) cultural adaptation (see Byram’s factors in intercultural commu-nication, Byram, 1997: 34; and Fantini’s components of intercultural compe-tence, Fantini, 2001: 2). Most recently, Kim (2001) has identified assimilation,acculturation, integration and adjustment as distinct outcomes in cross-cultural adaptation.

Common reflections and actions in settler narratives explicitly refer todesires of integrating and adjusting. For instance, they narrate episodes thatrelate the awareness of differences in physical appearance, knowledge of otherculture and language proficiency.

In Lambert’s book, we find him wondering if his family will be able toadapt to the new culture, and if his wife and he are right to impose theirwishes on their young son (Lambert, 2000: 36ff), for whom the new life abroadwill have an even greater impact on his identity:

The son of a Canadian mother and an English father with Irish blood inhis veins, growing up in Spain in a region where a lot of locals spokeanother language, Valenciano . . . Difficulties in finding an identity layahead. Blond hair among children who were predominantly darkwouldn’t help either. (Lambert, 2000: 50)

Lambert also signals how lack of knowledge of the culture adds to thedifficulties of integrating:

In Britain, America, or Canada, or any other country where customswere more familiar, I would have acted with more expediency [ . . .]. But,being a foreigner, I had to proceed with caution. Feelings could easilyturn against us if we acted autocratically. (Lambert, 2000: 32�33)

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Some of the settler narratives and ethnographic writings acknowledge thatmany adults feel learning the foreign language is not critical to theirintegration, as they are able to communicate somehow in their own languagewith the local people (Lambert, 2000: 135; O’Reilly, 2002: 92); however, forothers competence in the foreign language is of paramount importance, inparticular for settlers (Kim, 2001: 230), and some settler narratives suggest thatthis is indeed what makes or breaks the experience:

The greatest challenge was language [ . . .] British, Americans andGermans often struggled � they mostly succeeded, particularly thewomen who did the shopping, but a few gave up and went home.(Lambert, 2000: 33)

In this respect (and probably in many others) it is very evident that it is thechildren who integrate first, and who become symbols of the family’ssuccessful integration (O’Reilly, 2002), as narratised in the following passagefrom Driving over Lemons :

Having a daughter who was a native Granadina and fluent in Spanishhelped to contribute to our sense of being finally settled. ‘You’ve sownyour seed here � you’re one of us now,’ Old Man Domingo had told me.(Stewart, 1999: 198)

Lambert asserts their successful integration by commenting repeatedly on hisyoung son Jonathan’s adaptation. Among other things he points out his son’stransformation into a bilingual speaker (Lambert, 2000: 57), his eagerness toparticipate in a local festival (p. 96), as well as his ability to spit out ‘the husk ofa sunflower seed he had been nibbling’ (p. 71), a quintessentially Spanishpractice which, by being so mundane and unremarkable, exemplifies theextent of the cultural adaptation the child has gone through.

Well adapted children might vicariously fulfil the parents’ desire foradaptation, but they also symbolise a real commitment to the place, andcommitment is a strong currency in settler narratives. It might be precisely dueto this realisation of their new situation that the narrative of adaptation isgenerally cast in a positive light. There is also a feeling that it is up to theindividuals to make the experience work, and that they have almost a duty totry to make a success of it. As Lambert (2000: 33) puts it: ‘It was up to us toadjust, and some foreigners I had met elsewhere in Spain who didn’t tryshould never have left their native shores.’

In spite of this strong desire for adaptation, there is also a growingawareness of cultural difference, and an understanding that some deeply heldbeliefs or tastes are culturally specific and hard to change. In the settlers’narratives there is evidence of a tension between a desire for adaptation and adesire to maintain some of the more ingrained British customs.

Indeed, adopting the Other’s customs is by no means unproblematical, andsometimes there is evidence of culture clashes, as in the passage in whichChris Stewart finds himself in the middle of a gathering of a shepherd’s familyand friends, and is invited to partake of the meal of goat meat. His friend,Domingo, ‘took out his pocket-knife and began slicing and stabbing at themeat as others were doing.’ Stewart tries to do the same, not very successfully,

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‘I didn’t tell them that from my earliest years my mother had forbidden meutterly to eat from my knife and that I hadn’t developed the skill’ (Stewart,1999: 87). Cultural integration sometimes runs counter to the ingrainedtraditional values of the mother culture.

However, the aim of these settlers, as portrayed in the narratives I havebeen looking at, is to feel they belong. The first time that a local farmer asksStewart if he’ll shear his sheep with his electric shears, hitherto unknown inthe Alpujarran farming community, epitomises his sense of belonging: ‘Nolonger would I be an outsider observing, but I could step inside the scene andbecome one of the observed. This is something I had yearned to do in all myyears of travelling.’ (Stewart, 1999: 98).

Britishness: Redefining the SelfOne of the results of the intergroup contact that the authors and their

families undertake is that the relationship with the culture of origin isconstantly re-evaluated. The individual reactions to cultural contact thatemerge in the narratives echo some of the four main responses that have beenidentified in the literature: ‘passing’, chauvinistic, marginal and mediating(Ward et al ., 2001: 31) (Table 1).

Table 1 Outcomes of cultural contact (Bochner, 1982)

Response Type Multiple-groupmembershipaffiliation

Effect onindividual

Effecton society

Reject cultureof origin,embracesecond culture

‘Passing’ Culture 1 normslose salience,culture 2 normsbecome salient

Loss of ethnicidentity,self-denigration

Assimilation,culturalerosion

Reject secondculture,exaggeratefirstculture

Chauvinistic Culture 1 normsincrease insalience, culture2 norms decreasein salience

Nationalism,racism

Integrationfriction

Vacillatebetween thetwo cultures

Marginal Norms of bothcultures salientbut perceivedas mutuallyincompatible

Conflict, identityconfusion,overcompensation

Reform,social change

Synthesisebothcultures

Mediating Norms of bothcultures salientand perceivedas capable ofbeing integrated

Personalgrowth

Intergroupharmony,pluralisticsocieties,culturalpreservation

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As we will now see, settler narratives offer representations of these variedresponses, and of their effects on the individuals’ identity as well as on societyat large.

For instance, through the character of one of the old ‘colonial types’,Lambert provides a classic and slightly caricatured example of the chauvinisticresponse to culture contact, in which the second culture is very much rejectedand the first one exaggerated, resulting in the nationalistic and racist attitudesof the stereotypical ‘expat’, against whom Lambert competes in an arm-wrestling contest in the village:

I realized there was more at stake here than mere antiquated patriotism:we were going to battle over our attitudes to settling in a foreign land.His banner was isolationism, mine was integration. [ . . .] We claspedhands, his eyebrows rose, and we commenced battle, he the champion ofex-pat insularity, I the exponent (or so I liked to think) of respect for ourhosts’ customs. (Lambert, 2000: 140, 145)

If the expat represents chauvinism, and is, as O’Reilly (2002: 93) explains,‘trying to change Spain according to [his] own cultural beliefs and, in doingthis, [is] asserting not only [his] differences but [his] cultural superiority’, asettler like Lambert responds with respect to the host culture, and a desire tointegrate. The settler narratives illustrate how their authors adjust their normsand aspire to integrate: they don’t want to assimilate, rejecting their culture oforigin and embracing exclusively the new one, nor do they constitutethemselves as ‘marginals’, vacillating between the two cultures which areseen as mutually incompatible. Obviously the pressures on British settlers inSpain are very different to those exerted on other immigrant groups, whichmight account for the positive way in which cultural difference is dealt with.As O’Reilly (2002: 101) suggests, British settlers are not ‘in fear of losing theirsense of ethnic difference, their identity. Ethnicity is not stressed in interactionbecause there is no threat of homogenisation, no threat to their discreteidentity’, and ‘no pressure to assimilate; in short, none of those elements whichare incentives to assert identity’.

Thus, settlers seem to aspire to align themselves with some of the valuesand cultural practices of their hosts, whilst at the same time definingthemselves as other, and highlighting the aspects that make them differentfrom the host society. For instance, against the traditional and perhapssomewhat backward qualities that the Spaniards are seen to represent, theBritish settlers embody the spirit of adventure, albeit a little self-consciously, asthe following remark by one of Stewart’s acquaintances suggests:

‘I mean who the hell was going to buy a place that has no access, norunning water, no electricity � and that huge patch of land to work? Imust say I think it very bold of you to have bought it. Or maybe you area complete lunatic?’

‘I’m at least a half-lunatic’, I volunteered. But we’ll manage some-how. It’s an exciting challenge, and anyway, it beats being aninsurance clerk working in an office. (Stewart, 1999: 31)

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Indeed, this view is echoed by the migrants in O’Reilly’s (2002): 28) study, whosee themselves as ‘maverick, brave, different, exciting and fun-loving people’and explain that ‘It takes a lot of guts to do something like this. It’s not justordinary people, otherwise they’d still be in England. It takes that littlesomething extra’ (quote from one of O’Reilly’s participants, O’Reilly, 2002: 28).The settler narratives analysed here are also peopled by quirky characters,mostly eccentric women, some with vapid husbands in tow (Stewart, 1999:186), who are unflappable, such as the Englishwoman who, during therunning of bulls was sitting in a bar having a cup of tea and felt hot breath onher neck: ‘she swung round and stared into a pair of brown taurine eyes.Unfazed, she gave their owner a lump of sugar and he wandered back into thestreet’ (Lambert, 2000: 171).

One of the central elements around which the British character isconstructed is the British attitude to animals, and it is consistently used todefine them in opposition to the Spanish other. Another, obvious, element isrelated to the ubiquitous cup of tea, which is contrasted with the Spanish wine.On arriving in their new Spanish home after an endless, tedious drive fromEngland, Stewart and his wife exclaim:

What we needed was a cup of tea. If you’re English, or for that matterChinese, you always need a cup of tea at such moments, even if you’rejust moving into your new home on the continent. (Stewart, 1999: 56)

At the same time, these symbolic actions are presented, in some instances, incombination with learnt actions from the other, perhaps symbolic of thesettlers’ wish to synthesise both cultures in a new way of being, in a redefinedself. Stewart, for example, relates a situation where, during a country walk, heand his wife bump into a British couple who live nearby and, after the initialresentment of finding that the remote area they had chosen to settle in was notas ‘undiscovered’ as they had thought, they ‘forgave each other’s origin’ andshared ‘tea followed by wine’, becoming what Bochner (1999) has calledhyphenated people, as in Anglo-Spanish, or developing what Brewerdescribes as ‘dual identity’ (Brewer, 1999: 190), in which membership in bothcommunities is equal.

The study of intercultural communication, and in particular of interculturalnarratives, needs to acknowledge that ‘the boundaries [of a community] are influx and can be constructed, reconstructed, deconstructed, imagined or deniedaccording to individual and group needs, according to context, and accordingto the presence or not of a visible ‘‘Other’’’(O’Reilly, 2002: 119). This is a signfor Kim (2001: 66) of the development of an intercultural identity, a processthat ‘is filled with ambivalence and internal conflict between loyalty to theoriginal identity and the necessity to embrace a new one’.

Towards the end of Stewart’s account, however, a new development takesplace. After his initial reluctance to be associated with his fellow Brits, we readhow Stewart finally reconciles himself to accept, and celebrate, his ownBritishness:

However much you may fight against it, if you live abroad where thereare other expatriates, you become part of what is known as the Foreign

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Community. Initially, I struggled hard against this notion but as theyears passed I grew more relaxed about my status as a foreigner andmore willing to appreciate the ties that, by language, humour and sharedexperience, bound me to my compatriots. (Stewart, 1999: 182)

It is indeed possible to find in settler narratives successful attempts to mediatebetween the two cultures, to synthesise them, a skill which, interculturalexperts believe, leads to personal growth and to intergroup harmony (Bochner,1982). In his settler narrative, Stewart seems to be particularly successful atredefining his own identity, partly because he is able to accept his own firstculture whilst at the same time embracing the second culture, something thatKim has described as a ‘creative process of self-reinvention’ (Kim, 2001: 70) ina new cultural environment.

ConclusionThe travel writing genre offers first-hand, narratised accounts of cross-

cultural encounters. As we have seen, settler narratives, in particular, exposeissues of intercultural dynamics during long periods of residence abroad. Thispaper has examined the accounts of formation of new identities displayed innarratives of British settlers in Spain. The stories narrate instances of howidentities shift, at different speeds and with different outcomes, towards theforeign culture, and are finally modified into a new form. The ethnoscape thenarratives represent are having an effect on both host and home cultures, andthe mediascapes they contribute to serve the readers with repertoires ofimages, sense-making mechanisms, that enable them to engage with issuesaround intercultural contact and to create for themselves new imagined lives.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Inma Alvarez in the Department of Languages at theOpen University for her comments and advice on this paper.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Tita Beaven, Faculty of

Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Walton Hall, MiltonKeynes MK7 6AA, UK ([email protected]).

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