Remarkable therapy

If "speaking pidgin-nigger closes off the black man; it perpetuates a state of conflict in which the white man injects the black with extremely dangerous foreign bodies", and the newcomer who expresses himself expressly in French does so to emphasize the "rupture" that has occurred, it seems to me that all they're doing is valorizing the fragmentation of multiple subject-positions (the racially marked subject has broken off from the "effigy of him", an "essence", an "appearance"). This is as naturally reactionary as a raced subject's experiences that tell him that to celebrate the fragmented is to celebrate, or at least, remember, his own dismemberment (or perceived ejection, a break: he has "no culture, no civilization", no "long historical past"). The use of the oppressor's language here ("Our enemy is the teacher") can be modulated into the absurdity of privileging precisely those that have denied subject-status and agency to the marginalized and the oppressed. I think this is why the "old mother" cannot, or even refuses to understand this new incarnation ("a new type of man"!) of her son, she sees his new accent and slang as appropriate extremely dangerous foreign bodies. But things are never as simple as black or white (heh). In the end, I see language almost as a proselytizing agency determined to usurp the requisite inscription and repetition of Negro moral authority (because the Negro always has to say "Me work hard, me never lie, me never steal" ).

This willing internalization of oppression (or a reconstruction of self through the white Other) preludes Fanon's "disalienation of the black man". And still we have "a great black poet" instead of merely 'a great poet'. The power of language! That there is always this other, this contingency!

Here comes The Dedalus!

There is something remarkably Modernist about Stephen Dedalus' fascination with language and the inner world of emotions; it is this very quality that has us in thrall from the very beginning of the novel (at least it is for me), and his exploration of the associative qualities of language and prose that attempt to draw out the fluid quality of individual consciousness is also accompanied by an increasingly desperate sense of alienation. He rejects the nationalist cry ("Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or mystic after") because it is an uncritical patriotism; it is above all, a communal movement and as such, demands conformity for success (Parnell's clandestine affair with Kitty O'Shea dooms him). Stephen prizes his individualism: "You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" and this, I think, transcends the English/Irish binary opposition to come up with an aestheticist sensibility, one that is as self-assertive as a "portrait" and intellectual, almost demiurgic. His father taught him whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Stephen learns a more important lesson in his "reality of experience": never to peach on yourself.

The Furry Death

Dear Leonard Woolf, I personally do not find your subject of animals irritating in the least: no, indeed, I rather wish you'd had gone on. And on. And on. Or at least explained what exactly Bambi does when he acquires a nicotine addiction. i find myself horribly intrigued by Charles, "obviously a pukka English dog", as opposed to the pariah "yellow" dogs; I wonder what breed he was to have been so saliently genuine or superior, that he would, possessed by an "imperialist Anglo-Indian spirit" recognize a "native" cat. Caliber in this instance is proved by violence, the "rapidity" of murder that gleans "considerable prestige", which also gets translated into "canine society"- very reminiscent of colonial reaction and the modernist theme of anxiety about new uncertainties.
Growing actually made me think of a line: "For we are surrounded by mirrors, walled in by contradictory images of ourselves" when Woolf ponders on the rightness of sitting on a horse "arrogantly". This contradictory nature is also keenly observed in the anecdote he provided of his encounter of the graves of Adam and Eve. Charles is here the "dog of an infidel". The infidel here is also the savior, being trailed by "smiles and shaking of heads and lifting of hands".
Running an empire is, too, much like taming an elephant, using co-opted natives like "tame elephants" to assuage resistance, it's a "precarious position".

Who watched the newest episode of South Park (Pandemic) and tried grafting Stoler's ideas onto it? So if you obviously are a Peruvian pan flute band and yet... at the same time you're obviously not, you may very well be key in overthrowing Peru or saving the world from giant guinea pigs. Or it could just be why Craig says the kids at school dislike you. Heh heh heh.

a friend by any other name is a foe

My post will be about the "fraudulent recognition" of Flory as a friend. First off, other than the good doctor it's pretty much safe to say that Flory doesn't have any other friends (the "louts" at the Club he's so fond of denigrating won't be hard-pressed to call him one either, him and his "Bolshie" ideas). Strangely enough though the term "friend" is peppered liberally throughout the narrative, there are very few instances of Flory calling Veraswami that very name; he calls him "doctor" instead. This effectively puts distance between an Englishman and a Burmese and lends ballast to the disquieting sentiment that it is "a disagreeable thing when one's close friend is not one's social equal". This close friendship is one-sided; Flory is an exploiter in the same vein as the bigoted Ellis is but worse since he professes to be the doctor's friend and claims that that friendship "was not worth" the ugly rows that would break out were he to support the doctor's election to the club in the next breath. He only throws in his cloth together with Veraswami when he himself is in a position of power later on and therefore, untouchable. Veraswami's fanatic loyalty to the English is translated into his friendship with Flory, one that isn't reciprocated. Flory's suicide damns Veraswami to "pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes" and yet still Veraswami makes the necessary arrangements in the wake of his messy death, in both his official capacity as doctor and personal as friend, lying to preserve Flory's legacy, a legacy nobody else cares for anyway. He's as much removed from shok de as you can get.
The asymmetric essences embodied by the colonizer and colonized here are that of Flory's renunciation of his only ally and Veraswami's dogged decency.

Doublethink!

Orwell manages to puncture the mystique of the colonial whites by depicting them off-duty, which is perfectly aligned with the reader’s assumption that once again, this book is going to be a great critique of imperialism (it is George Orwell after all). Orwell’s antipathy toward imperialism manifests itself rather bizarrely in his veiled disdain for Burmese nationalism, whom he paints as effectively terrorists, dacoits and puppet peasants firmly in the thrall of U Po Kyin who wishes to fulfil his desire to become even more of a “parasite” upon the British by becoming part of them, by inclusion into the Club. Burmese nationalism is then characterized as friable; the riot is easily broken up. Even the editor of the Burmese Patriot who was at the center of it all wasn’t spared- he evidently abandoned his hunger strike after a feeble six hours. At the end of it all we are left with the distinct impression that U Po Kyin, ironically, poses more of a challenge to British rule by wanting to become an agent himself and continuing his shenanigans. His cupidity is more likely to reshape colonial society by playing into the corruption that it is predicated on (Orwell has already glossed on the myopia of the British- no British officer would ever believe anything against his own men). After all, “absorbed in intrigue”, isn’t U Po Kyin “practically invulnerable”, being “too fine a judge of men”? Flory’s epithets come to mind: he praises the “absolute savages” that Elizabeth perceives, calling them “highly civilized”, even more so than them. Indeed, U Po Kyin is more vile, more ingratiatingly clever, and ultimately more imperialist than say Maxwell or Flory. Lynnette posits that desire is recycled into banality and it is this precise banality that U Po Kyin idealizes, living under the aegis of deception of the Empire on all fronts.

Shooting an Elephant in the Foot

Orwell wrote that in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. It's a sentiment that informs our own reading of Shooting an Elephant. Orwell himself is the indefensible; A Passage to India and Heart of Darkness warn us of the virulence of imperialism: it corrupts the conquering as much as it does the subject peoples, fostering egotism and resentment. The torpidity that he feels toward shooting the elephant may be only a few steps removed from what he feels toward the "evil-spirited little beasts"; he has already expressed the greatest joy in the world is very possibly driving a bayonet into a "Buddhist priest's guts". Orwell is castrated by the power he purportedly wields over the Burmans, power that is ultimately revealed as a masquerade. I'm reminded of the Hegelian dialectic between master and slave, but Orwell doesn't even posit reciprocity in his essay, he paints the "will of those yellow faces" to be essentially insurmountable and "every white man's life is the East" as "one long struggle not to be laughed at". The individual/collective binary colludes with imperial exclusivity here.

The "dummy" here has a triple meaning; as a stock figure and a fool and more, as a perverted simulacrum of a human being, exactly like how he himself has "conventionalized" the "damn Coringhee coolie". He is glad of the coolie's death, for taking the heat off his decision, a decision made solely to reject becoming a grinning corpse.

Ruskin's oxymoron "fruitful waste ground" used to describe colonial lands is overturned here too; Orwell as representative of British imperialism murders the elephant on a seemingly perfunctory whim while the Indians rear these beasts of burden and strip them to the bone after they die.

Was it a badge- an ornament- a charm- a propitiatory act?

“Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now” are prodigiously racist. But Heart of Darkness is an impenetrable text and Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” is governed by vibrating indignance. I read the novel as a fairly straightforward text. It had glimmers of profound meaning throughout, but essentially I read it literally as a journey toward inexorable, illuminating truth. Human (Kurtz’s) end is to mean something, if not exactly a discourse on mortality. The specular qualities in Marlow and Kurtz’s relationship cohere the sense of a relay: Marlow accesses meaning when Kurtz accesses death. His narrative only reaches apotheosis when Kurtz dies and grants him experiential value in his story, if not authenticity.

Meaning is thus presented as mere (pithy yet strangulated) articulation of this “horror”. Death is to grant us knowledge of life in its last few moments but I don’t see Kurtz’s last words as particularly enlightening. It’s choked off, definitely not authoritative, and ironically diminished at the very moment it is realized. In fact, this cry is, I would argue, inarticulate. It’s something atavistic that has more in common with the incomprehensible babble of the natives than it does with the civilized language that Achebe argues Conrad withholds from the rudimentary souls to “let the European glimpse the unspeakable craving in their hearts.” It emphasizes the powerlessness of Kurtz on his deathbed, and the failure of language here is echoed in Marlow: he extrapolates the candour, conviction, revolt and glimpsed truth because he has need to. “And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the difference, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps!” Yeah, perhaps. I, on the other hand, excavate more significance in the contemptuous pronouncement “Mistah Kurtz- he dead.” (300 words)

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial...

I'd really like to find and read "Notes on the English Character" because I think it would shed a lot of light on A Passage to India at least in terms of ethos. I think this essay's included in the collection Abinger Harvest but I can't even find snippets of it online, alas.

So uh, I actually had a chunk to post before I realized, thanks to your posts, that I'd read Fanon's "The Negro and Language" as opposed to "On Violence". Brilliant. Anyway. Violence is specular rather than diffuse. This polemical tract wasn't enlightening as much as it was refreshing; I think it reaffirmed what we already knew/studied/suspected, without mincing words. The act of consuming (or consummation, even) is central: the colonists want to possess and perpetrate while the colonized masses want to eradicate and replace. Nietzsche, Wagner and Hitler all had something in common: they looked upon leadership as sexual mastery of the "feminine" masses. This rape, I think, underpins the reading. Colonization or decolonization: it is merely a power struggle. Reading A Passage to India throws up various parallels: 'You're superior to them, anyway. Don't forget that. You're superior to everyone in India except one or two of the ranis, and they're on an equality.' You can't deny the racism inherent in colonialiam by corollary, the violence inherent in colonialism. In Zadie Smith's article, Furbank calls Forster the "great simplifier". Both the text and the reading assigned this week ARE simplified; let's recall Fanon's easy dismissal of the colonial world as a "compartmentalized" world. He proceeds to divide that world into two to (I really think) better facilitate his theory that the colonial world is "a Manichean world" in which, of course, violence reigns. There is a certain implicit violence in smashing the colonized to smithereens, by laying their moral code flat on a rock and taking a hammer to it. That is what Fanon means by absolute evil, that values are, in fact, "irreversibly poisoned and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized." We see this stain rearing its ugly head in A Passage to India. Best example for me? "Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession." Seriously, this made me sad guys.

I think it was Fielding who persisted in wanting to see Adela, citing the reason that 'on the off-chance of her recanting before you send in that report and he's committed for trial, and the whole thing goes to blazes' to the Police Superintendent. Fielding wanted to ask her himself, because he believes in Aziz, because she is "among people who disbelieve in Indians." Just a few lines before, the Police Sup had paternalistically said "when an Indian goes bad, he goes not only very bad, but very queer" and proceeded to remind Fielding that the "psychology here is different." Ergo, Fanon's binary system is at play in Forster's novel too, in addition to the babel that association with the Other invariably produces.

I think it was Nadia who posted on the aesthetics of violence. It is both ironic and intriguing to me that we're essentially debating how the relation of masters and slaves should be consciously aestheticized this week. Forster wrote, using a character as a mouthpiece that there is no such person in existence as a general Indian. I really liked that line, and though I find him no Naipaul, I think A Passage to India really reaffirmed the sentiment that all representations of India are ultimately autobiographical. There wasn't anything particularly Indian in the text (colonial and racist, yeah), even the nationalist struggles were shunted in the back, but a lot of Forster shone through. In conclusion, violence induces ruptures, entices with the promise of transgression of boundaries, and when inflicted, paves the way for modernist aesthetics, because modernism was a response to the chaos of our world, our answer after having been exposed to reinterpretation and acceleration and existential, dare I say it, angst to alienation, loss, absurdity and meaninglessness. Individual subjectivity tends to glomp to solidarity and the intimacy of violence is a primal bond. This revolutionary consciousness is present in both Fanon's reading and Forster's (albeit muted/incarnated in another form as evinced by the ending) novel.

Us, the Other and the In Between.

In retrospect, I think i actually enjoyed perusing the readings more than I'd thought I would. They made me reflect on the "new imperialism" that began in the 1880s and that stamped its legacy on the Third World.
What I found of especial interest in Levine's "Ruling an Empire" is the anxiety over the perceived possible corruption of the Britons by the native, 'lesser' cultures which would inevitably undermine British rule. "Pocahontas" jumped into my mind at that point and refused to budge. In my study of history in secondary school and junior college I guess I'd conveniently glossed over the fact that assimilation at the height of Britain's imperial power was very much a "one-way street". It is easy to get blindsided by the colonized people's struggles. After all, jingoism was the rallying cry of the day, one that united nationalism, anti-Semitism and imperialism. I for one have always found myself focusing on the harsh sentiment voiced by Jews of the time; the harshest thing one man can tell another is that your "blood, your soul, your sensibility has no place in our community, you are and will remain different, ignoble, alien." There is variance, but there are also parallels in the colonists' cases and that fascinates me; they couldn't and didn't remain inviolate and to expect them to remain perfectly aloft was ludicrous and doomed from the onset. They had to strive for it though, because they had effectively garlanded themselves and stepped on to the pedestals of their own volition; to temper their personas would mean undermining their power and authority over the less civilized. Even Picasso was irritated by the influences the Negroes had on him even as he loved the "magical influence" of the primitive and tribal. After all, there can be a certain kind of nobility in savagery, as Levine touches on in the case of the Amerindians, or rather, I would venture to say, romanticism. Therefore, I would think that one of the concerns of this module is the margins of identity as well as the modes of identification. Because decolonization was a process rather than a simple appearance, these identification imperatives are vastly dynamic and more, even a type of recolonization.
Levine also piqued my interest further with mention of Bronte's St John Rivers, who is a favorite character of mine. She mentions the trend among converts in "adapting Christianity to a variety of colonial customs and traditions, an un-expected and, to the missionaries, mostly unwelcome outgrowth of their efforts." This confluence of identities has shaped the world as we know it today and even in contemporaneous social times, the distinction between race and religion is ambiguous. For example, there are cultural aspects of being Malay that aren't exactly endorsed by Islam and history is not so much a palimpset as a continually shifting entity.
I really like what Yuen Mei highlighted in her post. Orientalism is, for the most part, still superficial or at least, vaguely specular. And I do agree that the intimacy of savagery and the artistic sensibility is crucial in the aesthetic of modernism, as evinced by our current furious blogging. The fallout, and its multiplicities, are for us to ponder on.

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail