The unsettled self: creative practice and the nomadic poetics of a contemporary flâneur

Migrants and their children are often ‘unsettled’ from their ancestral homelands, caught between identification with one culture and another. This chapter explores the experience of in-between-ness that this kind of relationship generates. The author focuses on his own connections to Venice and the Veneto: a site in which he identifies himself as an insider/outsider—a familiar-stranger to his own past. By referring to theories of nomadism, in-between-ness and translation, it is argued that writing in situ is a creative act that connects the self to various terrains; linguistic, literary, historical, ancestral, real and imagined. In so doing, the writer enacts and embodies what can be thought of as a contemporary form of flânerie. This form of creative wandering is in turn a mechanism through which poetry is created, affording the author a method through which he maps subjectivity onto the terrain across which he roams, and a means to engage in processes of de- and re-colonisation that ‘resettle’ the self in time and space.