Symbolic boundaries - space of cultural hybridism, a reading of “The brothers”, by Milton Hatoum

Abstract

In a cultural and social context the idea of boundary is an unfolding of the idea of Nation, both seen as discursive constructions therefore with symbolic implications. The boundary is built from the difference, it is molded close to the Otherness and needs it to be determined. The boundary, then, denounces the tensions between two spaces: the inside and outside, the Self and the Other. At the same time, it promotes imbrications between its binary pairs, resulting in a hybrid zone where contact occurs between the separated poles, space in which they are put face to face. Based on this idea of border, this article aims to discuss the symbolic boundaries observed in the novel The Brothers, by Milton Hatoum. The narrative questions the cultural and identity hybridism resulting from border areas, showing the confrontations and flows that are verified in the border space from the figure of the immigrant and the mestizo. As Homi Bhabha suggests, in this work the boundaries are conceived as bridges that act in a movement of “ambulatory articulation, ambivalent”. The borderline is, therefore, what one might call in-between, an interstice.