Mastery of language - whose power

Sorry, just got to share this. Just to add to Kelly’s experience, I was in Sweden (many years ago) at some international camp and someone asked us (we were all female!) if we lived in trees in Singapore and if the women stayed at home to cook!?! (No he was not trying to be funny. He thought Singapore was in China!) Talk about ignorance right?

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power” (Fanon 18). Let us rephrase that “Mastery of the colonial language affords remarkable power”. The colonial language continues to be a powerful medium and this is evident in the sheer number of English books we find in bookstores around the world. Fanon states that the one “who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is” (Fanon 38) but we see in Stephen that the more he acquires the colonial language, the more aware he becomes of his alienation from it:

The language in which we are speaking is his before mine. How different are the words . . . on his lips and on mine . . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired language. (Portrait 205)

The question is how does one reconcile the use, or need for the English language with preserving cultural identity? I think Yeats and Joyce have done that. They have appropriated the English language and blended it with their own culture to create an “Irishness” that people will study for a long long time (English Literature students at least). They are examples of how a colonized people can ‘fly by those nets’ (Portrait 220).

A Portrait

The tension between identity and language is interesting. Davin asks Stephen “Are you Irish at all” (219) because he spoke against the Irish reformers. What does it mean to be Irish, or British (or Singaporean for that matter since we do not even have a language of our own). There is a lot of emphasis on language in Portrait, Davin believed that speaking Irish would make Stephen more ‘Irish’ but I get the sense that language does not and cannot define our identity. The same thing that is called a “funnel” or “tundish” doesn’t change what it is; it merely changes the perspective in which we recognize it. If it is not language, what defines our nationality? This is quite a stretch but Stephen needed to find new perspective/find his identity or redefine ‘Irishness’ by leaving Ireland and in Passage, Ronny became more ‘British’ in India (British imperialist cliquishness) which was accentuated by his initial admiration for Adele’s individuality (Passage 44) until it led to her being ostracized by the colonists’ community.

“Irish families simultaneously upheld and subverted the Empire” (Jackson 137) – this split in loyalty exists not only in Ireland but within the empire itself. We’ve seen it in Flory and Veraswamy in Burmese Days, Fielding and Aziz in Passage, and Stephen and Davin in Portrait, there is no absolute consensus within their own community on colonialism. So far, we’ve been associating the two camps colonizer/colonized in terms of racial binaries - white/non-white but in Portrait, we’re reminded that Europeans (Irish) too were colonized by the British. In previous texts, colonialism is intrinsically linked to race, at the same time, it isn’t really just race. Nationality is defined by the language we speak, the views we share yet we don’t share the same views. The inability to categorize and define empire seems to be complicate by modernism’s multi-perspective, polyphonic voices that are allotted to individuals?

Dogone days...

I think it was the way Woolf framed it but I was exasperated that even the dog possessed “the imperialist Anglo-Indian spirit” such that it knew its superiority over native dogs. It seemed rather odd Woolf’s claim that he was curiously unaware of his status as an imperialist. Surely the climate in the colonies was sufficiently different from London and the power the sahibs possess over the natives must have been apparent. The tennis club, in the same way as the European club in Burmese Days, was as a symbol of white superiority and exclusivity. Perhaps he was unconsciously justifying his role by feigning ignorance?

Stoler noted that “what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic” (Stoler 57). Here, I am reminded of the sensation stirred by Adela’s alleged sexual assault by Aziz in Passage to India, and the absence and silence of women in Growing. The few women we encounter are that of miserable wives of colonial administrators as they enter into the prison of marriage. Mrs Dutton transits from a relatively independent missionary to the confines of a sterile marriage. Mrs Price bears her suffering in silence “except for the unhappiness terribly stamped on her face”.

Comparing the role of Ma Kin and the European wives, Mrs Price and Mrs Dutton, all three women do not have autonomy and suffer their roles in silence. The men do not take them seriously nor value their opinions let alone care about their happiness in the marriage. How different are they? Perhaps the only endorsement available to European wives is to take on the role of the male imperialist dog (like Elizabeth’s high-handed treatment of domestic staff after marriage in Burmese Days).

Crossing boundaries

The “purity of the community… the essence of the community [as] an intangible “moral attitude”, a multiplicity of invisible lines” (Stoler 516) that cannot be crossed is seen in Flory, May and Dr Veraswami. Flory crosses the racial lines of imperialism by befriending and aligning his sympathies with the colonized. However, with Elizabeth’s arrival, the invisible lines that divide colonizers and colonized are unveiled as he realizes that he “longed all these years for somebody to talk to!” His acute loneliness stems from straddling between his colonist lineage and disapproved friendships with the locals. In May and Dr. Veraswami, there is a reversal of racism as they believe the colonists as superior to their own race and actively seeks to cross into the domains of the colonists’ community. May thought that becoming the wife of a white man would give her prestige and earn respect while Dr Veraswami believed his own race as inferior to the colonists.

Both Colonizers and colonized are trapped within the nets of imperialism. Dr. Veraswami and May can never cross into the other community while Flory can never assimilate into the Burmese because of the burden of his colonist status:

But we can't help it… a demon inside us driving us to talk. We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and somehow never can. It's the price we pay for coming to this country.

The disgrace and fear of contamination of the white race by metissage cost Flory his life. Most of all, all who transgressed from and into the boundaries of ‘pure communities’ suffer humiliation, poverty and death while those who remained within their side of the picket fences (Elizabeth, Macgregor, Ellis etc) continue to perpetuate racial demarcation. In the end, both colonizers and colonized cannot escape their ‘birthmarks’.

It was not what he had done that horrified her…It was, finally, the birthmark that had damned him.

Women in Burmese Days

Orwell criticizes colonialism and attempts to expose “the lie that [colonizers are] here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them”, but his critique of the evils of colonialism is confined to the male-centred world. Orwell does not extend the same critique to colonialism’s complicity in reinforcing the subjugation of women. This disparity is embodied in Flory’s treatment of indigenous men, striking friendships with Veraswami and other indigenous men while simultaneously mistreating Ma Hla May like a domesticated pet-slave; he purchases her from her parents and describes her as having “rather nice teeth, like the teeth of a kitten”. The manner in which Flory mistreats and abuses Ma Hla May serves as a parallel to Elli’s misogynistic contempt for indigenous women. English colonizers exert ‘control’ over indigenous women’s bodies by commodifying their bodies. The multiplicity of women’s identities is embodied in Ma Hla May; she is “the woman”, “mistress”, “concubine”, “wife”, “prostitute” depending on how the Englishman defines her or how she defines herself in relation to the colonizer.

In Burmese Days, both European and indigenous women are subjected to the oppression of the male colonizers. The club functions as the symbolic space in which imperial superiority and more significantly, white-male authority is reinforced by its’ exclusive “clubbability”. It is a place where misogynistic jokes are exchanged and while European women are admitted into the club, they are excluded from the right to vote, a privilege reserved exclusively for English males. The club serves as “the Indian marriage-[meat] market” where single white females are objectified as “carcasses of frozen mutton, to be pawed over by nasty old bachelors”. The symbolic oppression of women’s freedom becomes a literal imprisonment when “in cases of riot European ladies were always locked inside the jail until everything was over”. So, Orwell was anti-imperialist and as some called him, a socialist but women are excluded from his campaign against oppression. . . Hmmm. . .

ps/ sorry my quotes do not have page references cos I read the text online...

The Reluctant Imperialist

Ok, I am a little sympathetic to the narrator. I see his inconsistencies, or hypocrisy at one level, and his reluctance in his role in the imperialist regime, as a human condition, not an imperialist one. What seems apparent in SAE and Chatterjee’s article, is that the disparity in theory and practice cannot be bridged easily especially in political history.

“Theoretically . . . I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British”.

In theory, the narrator bears “hatred of the empire” and is guilt ridden by the evils of imperialism. Yet at the practical level, he suffers “sneers”, “insults” and “hideous laughter” from the Burmese whom he, in theory, supported. The reality of the dislike and discrimination against the narrator by the Burmese flames his anger at them. Similarly in Chatterjee’s article, “that there should be one law alike for the European and Native is an excellent theory (21)” at best and cannot be practically realized in a period where racial and cultural differences are magnified by inequalities in power.

While one could argue that the narrator had a choice in his actions, it would also be oversimplifying a difficult issue such as colonialism. I think one problem with reading at a distance, is that it is easier to make moral judgments in hindsight because we do not experience the dilemmas or the full extent of political and emotional conflicts in a situation. I was just imagining if I was pressed with “two thousands wills” to act in a matter of minutes or seconds, what would I have done? While his inconsistencies between thought and action is problematic, since he is part of the imperialists, nonetheless we can empathize as he seems a more reluctant imperialist assuming a role placed upon him by both sides.

(300 words)

Words, facts, words, facts, let's call the whole thing off...

This is something I found rather amusing. We’ve just ploughed through scores of words, reading accounts, “facts” about Jim’s life, adventures and misfortunes (and some other characters along the way) but we are not closer to knowing who the ‘real’ Jim is. I, as the reader, was drawn to his character, like the way Kurtz did, into wanting more, more what? More facts about him to satisfy my curiosity but “as if facts could explain anything” right? Anyone can talk about anyone or anything, describing events, personalities, trivia etc. but all this excess talk does not tell us who the person is – an entire novel was dedicated to Jim but he remains “inscrutable at heart”.

Maybe the text or the character of Jim is not meant to be understood. The complex and intense alteration to a person after a ‘life-changing’ event cannot be explained or interpreted. By positing that “he is one of us”, Conrad has removed the centre from the author, the narrator or even the reader. It is a rejection that all positions are mere interpretations since that implies that there is a truth or centre in which meaning exists in fixity. Rather the text has become “infinite” in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.

In the modernist world, literature, speech and writing, it seems, is a battle of interpretations. Authors, critics, us students of Literature, need (and distress!) to communicate and the greater the need, the greater the snowball effect of overflowing words. Language is at once superfluous, excessive and full of poverty because language trivializes the individual’s experience, it makes the unique common and reduces the individual to a definition - a “fact”. So perhaps Lord Jim should remain “inscrutable at heart”

(294 words)

A Pile of Bones

In writing an anti-imperialist novella, or a story about the oppression of a race, how else could an author depict the atrocities committed onto the subjugated race if not by portraying the worst of extremes in the roles of the bully and bullied to provoke thought? Achebe’s point that Conrad is a ‘bloody racist’ becomes irrelevant since I think the question should perhaps be ‘how racist are the readers’?

We see the failure of technology as we “travel back to the earliest beginnings of the world”. The colonizers’ enter Africa with steamships, weapons and their progressive ideologies but cannot escape Africa’s call to return to animalism. Kurtz the epitome of the white colonizer who is supposed to be on top of the food chain is reduced to crawling in the jungle. Kurtz’s regression into animalism suggests that the cycle of evolution has come full circle and that the natives are the fittest in the game of survival and all intruders have to beat a retreat.

The measuring of Marlow’s crania was surreal. The isolated head leads us to the display of impaled skulls outside Kurtz’s house. The clinical manner in which it was conducted was very perfunctory. Like the accountant, director and wool knitting lady, Conrad portrays everyone as part of a circus act, each performing their respective “monkey tricks”. Identities are superfluous since “what does [it] matter if the trick is well done”? This makes the job of superimposing identity-less accountants and wool knitting ladies onto these skulls rather easy. Europeans, Africans and animals ultimately return to a state of bones. Race, gender, power politics are rendered meaningless. . .

(266 words)

Of Violence and Friendship

Fanon states that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world” in which the colonists and colonized are fundamentally divided by race. The colonists impose their superiority through violence and intimidation in the form of the police or through education which instills acceptance of their subjugation. However, the compartmentalization of a country does not seem to be simply about race. In Passage, India is presented as fragmented and unknowable even within the natives. The Hindu-Moslem divide as seen in Aziz’s reference to “Slack Hindus . . . Nothing Sanitary” (p 63); the subtle but distinct caste divide when Aziz shares a game with “a stray subaltern”. Aziz’s comment that “nothing embraces the whole of India. . . that was Akbar’s mistake”, suggests India’s disunity even before the colonists arrived. The difference here is that Indians are united in their shared experience of a common oppressor and all other religious and caste differences are pushed beneath the surface of this overpowering tyrant.

If we see colonization as the rape of a country, and the country that emerges in the aftermath of colonialism as the ‘bastard-child’ of the offence/crime, this ‘child’ signifies a new life - a beginning. I’m not suggesting that it is possible to start anew on a clean slate, no, that is impossible. The ‘child’ carries with it the legacy of violence and trauma of the ‘rape’ but nevertheless, there is a future that awaits negotiating between absolute rejection of its colonial past and etching out a future that benefits the ‘child’ best. Which is the better life? The “primitive” pre-colonial days or the industrially/educationally more advanced post-colonial future, we do not know, but what we do know, is that we can never return to the ‘untainted’ pre-colonial days of the past. The dream of meeting the oppressors on a level playing field seems rather pessimistic seen from the perspective of Passage.

Aziz appears to think that violence is necessary towards achieving an even field in which the English and Indians can co-exist in peace. This supports Fanon view’s that violence is the only possible solution towards decolonization and the rehabilitation of the oppressed man.

“. . . we shall rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then . . . you and I shall be friends” (p306)

Fielding and Aziz, the only hope in bridging the gap between the colonists and colonized, inevitably part and in fact become increasingly incompatible. They can never achieve true friendship as the imbalance between colonists and colonized is too great. The humiliation from the violence of colonization is too deeply ingrained to be eased by two individual’s affections for each other.

“. . .socially they had no meeting-place. He had thrown in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a country-woman, and he was acquiring some of its limitations, and already felt surprise at his own past heroism. . . . Aziz was a memento, a trophy, they were proud of each other, yet they must inevitably part.” (p303)

To the question if Aziz and Fielding can ever be friends. . .

“No, not yet”
“No, not there”

No, not ever? . . .

The polyphonic voices in A Passage to India

At first glance, Forster seems the omniscient narrator revealing all the various characters and following the conventional plot driven novelist. However, as we read on, there is also a sense of the polyphonic voices emerging as characters reveal their subjective understanding of the awkward relationship between the British and Indians. Although Forster seemed to present the British rather negatively in their interactions with Indians (with the exception of Fielding, Mrs Moore and maybe even Miss Quested), I did not think that the narrator is steering our opinions towards a bias for or against either the Indians or the British. What Forster comments on is the problematic social, political and religious conflict that inevitably occurs when two cultures meet, let alone at an unequal playing field.

Perhaps the modernist aspect lies in the subjectivity of the novel? Reality is presented as subjective as the characters reveal multiple perspectives based on their limited understanding of what they see and experience in their interactions with each other. India is perceived by the British as a “muddle” because of their inability to ‘box-up’ India and understand its culture, for “no one is India”. The multiplicity and complexity of Indian culture varies too widely within its peoples that even the natives cannot provide easy classification (consider the caste system, religion and level of education) that “no one is India”.

“In her ignorance, she regarded him as “India,” and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is India.”

Similarly, the text does not allow us to label and assign its characters - Aziz, Mrs Moore and Miss Quested, into definitive categories since they are constantly evolving and developing. This perhaps hints at the ‘unfinalizability’ of the self; that the self cannot be completely understood and known as we recognize that people change as they gain new perspectives and understandings. Therefore the individual can never be fully revealed just as India can never be fully understood.

My random thoughts...

While Auerbach acknowledges that “it is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth”, Auerbach states that we are moving towards “an economic and cultural leveling process”. Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems to me that Auerbach is visioning a unified weltanschauung through “unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people.” I find this an interesting thought yet at the same time, problematic. If we refer to Levine’s ‘Ruling An Empire’, converts were given Christian names and had to give up their identities and local customs in order to assimilate into the colonizer’s culture and language was an integral tool used by missionaries to ‘educate’ and promote western values. If we consider that the language of a people reflects the weltanschauung of that people in the form of their linguistic structures and nuances, the fact that we are reading these texts in the English language which is not the native language of most colonized countries, poses a problem. We all perceive things differently, even in the everyday trivialities (eg. the multifarious views of Mrs Ramsay through the eyes of different people), how much more so in different cultures with vastly different languages? Therefore, is “cultural leveling” really possible? Is Auerbach’s visioning of “unification and simplification” perhaps too simplistic and optimistic?

From what I gather in Gikandi’s article, the ethnic Other serves as a “source of new energies” and understanding the Other goes as far as it benefits Western civilization. There never was the intention of the West assimilating with the ‘savage’. Levine’s article reminds us of the reality of violence associated with imperialism especially helpful while reading Heart Of Darkness. However, what is the connection between Modernism and Empire? Are we brushing aside the violence that came with the African artifacts when the art is taken without the remembrance and understanding of its culture? The representation of reality it seems to me, is still rather one-sided where the Other is selectively brought to the fore when it is convenient in the case of Picasso’s African influences without interest in the people.

Sorry this is really sketchy as they are just random thought processes.