Violence & the Crowd: Familiar?

In Burmese Days, we see the episode in which Flory and Elizabeth go shooting, and end up hunting down a tiger which they kill. This act of violence/killing, is just as graphic as the one we saw in Shooting an Elephant, but what was entirely different was how they set out to shoot( perform that act of violence in the first place). Elizabeth in particular seems to have quite an unsettling attitude toward violence; namely that she doesn’t quite care. When Flory was telling her about the “imperial pigeon”, how “the Burmese” believe it vomits when it dies and that it is “murder to shoot them”, all she asks is “Are they good to eat?” (All Ch 13)This (apart from being horrifically funny), suggests not just an absent “humanitarianism”(Stoler 514), but also a certain consumption of the colonial land in terms of its exotic material(which we could read as the imperial west needing the raw materials to fuel their industrialized west)Elizabeth loves violence, it is only after this shooting event she seemed to be drawn to Flory( but we all know how THAT turned out). In the end, its violence, violence, violence: Flory shoots Flo( who is part of Flory in well name and companionship), then shoots himself, and of course that whole violence of the riot, which reverberates a clear “rejection of the terms of the civilizing mission”(Stoler 551) with its ideas of civility, order and humanity in the western imperialist lifestyle.

The riot outside the Club shows another Orwellian scene of the crowd, previously seen in Shooting an Elephant with those “yellow faces”, in Burmese days they were “pouring in by the hundreds” and “rushing around aimlessly” without much purpose except to keep “flinging stones, yelling and hammering at the walls”. The crowd is always painted as a mass (MESS) of “whatever-ness” with their noise and physical mass being the focus rather than their intellect or social purpose .This depiction may reflect Stoler’s idea that there is a “conflation of racial category… cultural competence and national identity” (Stoler 514). The mass of the Burmese are lumped together in their race and ‘therefore’ their lack of culture which perhaps to the west mean their(Burmese) ‘national identity’ equate to general incompetence.

Violence in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant

The mere title blasts at you the idea of physical Violence in the word “shooting”. It connotes a deliberate desire to inflict pain through violence, and placing it in terms of modernism, the symbol of the gun (the mechanized weapon) is metaphorical of the other kinds of violence the West inflicts on the east. In terms of Social Violence we see strict classifications of class &capabilities where the “sub-divisional police officer “ suffered “anti-European feeling” and the locals are seen as merely a blur, a mass, “an immense crowd” and the victim as “ an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie”. The locals are identified as a large statistic, the colour of their skin, or by nature of the fact that in opposition to the intellectual, rational, modern west, theirs is physical work. Looking at psychological violence, we see the need to perform role(s) because of pressure from others, pressure of institution(s); The colonizer as colonizer and the colonized as the “other”. Linguistic Violence sees tensions between English and the native tongue in the difficulty of expression on an individual and communal level. The narrator describes the elephant as being one that while was not wild, was one “which had gone “must”. This (mis)use of language shows the inability to reconcile cultural differences in language and the way of life; the narrator’s rejection of his position as imperial authority, and as a westerner entrenched in the east. We see violence on language in the forced way in which the locals’ speech is mapped onto western tones/sentence structures. When the old lady warns, “Go away child! Go away this instant!”, the formal language of the west (which can be seen perhaps as the formal institution of imperial bureaucracy) imposes itself on the eastern speech(which can be seen perhaps as the ability for the east to be truthfully expressed).Linking this to Chatterjee, does this suppose that violence is also then a site of colonial difference?

Violence and Representation

My post is related to Yisa's suggestion that the artist must do violence to representation for "a kind of healing can occur, within the individuals who approach art either from the standpoint of the artist or from that of the audience."

In class the notion of "violence" in nationalistic poetry was brought up: the birth of the new nation state is forged through a poetry which "does violence" to existing language: in this way, the colonisers language is now re-arranged to speak of the native's experience, or the native's language breaks out of its traditional form/content and addresses issues of modernity and the nation. The old laws in the state of representation are broken; new laws are formed, and the state of poetry is symbolic of the nation state.

In this sense, violence is not only destructive, but also productive; nonetheless what it produces does not transcend violence, merely re-arrange it. Fanon's act of writing/narrating "On Violence" comes to mind, it is a violent gesture turning the colonisers Hegelian dialectic and the language back against them.

I suggest that Forster's "A Passage to India" also does violence to representation, but in a different way: through a process of “erasure”, which problematises any mode of representation’s hold on reality. In the novel, events which are described off-handedly become significant (Mohammad Latif’s bribing of Antony), events that seem central are then made to seem trivial (Mrs Moore’s epiphany in the caves), actions that reconcile also further division (Aziz’s collar stud).

What does this violence produce? I suggest it opens the possibility for a state of interpersonal relationships that is immediate and somehow beyond language (or at least, the rhetoric of coloniser/colonised). One glimpses this inexpressible state in Aziz's affection for Mrs Moore/Ralph/Fielding, who resorts to a mere platitude: "You are an Oriental".

“You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse”

[I thought this quote from Caliban - typically thought to be Shakespeare’s figure for the native – was kind of apt because cursing = a violence against language]

It seems to me that Fanon’s polemical chapter stands not only as an exposition on the physical violence endemic in colonialism; on a more meta level, it performs violence of another sort – the (re)writing of narrative with the intention of usurping existing ones.

I would particularly like to consider this violence of narrative in light of Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s book when it was first published in 1961. On a basic level, Fanon is writing back to Empire, retaliating in much the same way as the natives physically do in his text. What I find interesting, though, is the way in which he does it: he literally sets out a historical narrative, a semi-detached observation of the flow of events in the interaction between settler and native (which later evolve into the capitalist West and the Third World). It is a mode of narrative highly reminiscent of Marx and Engels - the opposition of dialectics, the progression of society from capitalist to Communist - and I think it is a deliberate move on Fanon’s part. Besides his clear socialist and anti-capitalist slant, he is hijacking the Marxist narrative of violent revolution, change, and historical progress and moulding it to fit the colonial context. These connotations would not have been lost on the Western audience. Sartre says: “Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day” (13), and indeed by presenting his argument as “history” Fanon clearly places the days of settler-native in the past. Now is the time of change and native violence, the time when colonial narratives get rewritten or erased to prepare the way for the tabula rasa of the new nationalist narrative.(Again to quote Sartre: “…in the past we made history and now it is being made of us”.)

The idea of conflicting and rewriting narratives is not new – one could say it marked the ‘soft’ side of imperialism: rewriting the rules, the history, the understanding of the East to fit Western frames. This is clear in Passage to India, in which Adela’s original narrative of what happened in the Marabar caves clearly trumps whatever narrative Aziz or his lawyer can weave in his defence. Yet at the same time, what happens in the caves is immaterial; what matters is the divergence of narratives that Forster can give us, for in the end the micro-narratives of the text are woven into a macro one by Forster with India as his main narrative. Interestingly though, Forster’s India narrative is essentially an unknowable (to repeat the point from last week), empty one for him to fill, like a blank canvas for him to paint or the empty echo of ‘boum’.

I think it may be too reductionist to say that this is Forster’s way of still imposing a (white) master narrative on his text (despite the multi-faceted view he presents), but you could draw a parallel with what Sartre does in his preface. While he seems to be trying to take Fanon’s point of view, the fact that he feels he has to explain Fanon’s points and make an appeal to his Western brethren turns his preface into an enwrapping, paratextual narrative for a reader of Fanon’s text. Pick up the book and you are reading Fanon first filtered through Sartre, as Passage to India becomes India filtered through Forster.

However, my question is: is it only in the nature of colonial-colonised narratives to be violent? Or is narrative in itself violent in the sense that it can be rewritten, taken apart, re-angled? I think modernism emphasizes this point best in the way that it fragments narrative (a form of violence against the unitary narrative) and breaks it up; in the same way, then, perhaps Fanon’s opposition and fragmentation of Western/historical narrative makes it deeply modernist – in spirit if not in form.

Violence

The problem I have with the advocacy of violence in decolonization is that there is something inherently primal, chaotic and mad in the use of force. This can be seen in the story by Cesaire, where the rebel describes the night where the slaves murdered their masters – “We were running like lunatics; fiery shots broke out…We were striking. Sweat and blood cooled us off. We were striking amidst the screams and the screams became more strident and a great clamor rose toward the east…” (Fanon 46) Also in Passage to India – the mob rise up against the English during the trial with a kind of irrational fervor, as they begin chanting “Esmiss Esmoor” – and after the trial they start a riot, “entirely desirous of [Major Callendar’s] blood, and the orderlies were mutinous and would not let him over the back wall…” (222)

If modernism is about consciousness, then violence as something senseless and totalizing seems to go against the principles of modernism, for violence also indicates a complete erasure of rationality and reason, and a perhaps a return to primeval chaos, to un-consciousness. Another disturbing thing is the necessity of annihilation in the practice of violence. Violence does not only destroy the colonizer, it also implies an annihilation of the colonized “self”, as how Fanon puts it, a cleansing force. “[Violence] rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.” (Fanon 51) But again, annihilation of “self” could be a destruction of consciousness and of ridding oneself of any sense of values and moral reasoning. The ironic twist, of course, is that violence is the language of colonialism. And if violence indicates an erasure of reason, then the entire colonial project of spreading reason and civilization collapses.

[Finally, when I think of Fanon’s argument that in decolonization, one must be “determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered”, I am reminded of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It’s not exactly related to decolonization, but during this period, the Khmer Rouge were calling for complete change, abolishment of foreign influence, all cities were emptied and people moved to the countryside, all forms of traditional art were destroyed and replaced. It was basically, annihilation, and starting things from ground zero. The sense I get is that, to “smash every obstacle”, and to find ways and means of annihilating the colonized ruler, will only lead to massive and disastrous consequences, like that of Khmer. ]

"mankind and flowers": a passage to violence

(this is a fairly ambitious post, please bear with me)

Aziz's interest in religious poetry appears to be a throwaway characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual. Yet this emphasis on aesthetic experience is one of the central intertwined strands of the novel, along with friendship, religion and nationalism. There is a moment early on in the novel where Aziz while ill, with Haq, Hamidullah and Syed Mohammed gathered around bed, recites lines from Urdu poet Ghalib. The narrator notes the effect, that "[l]ess explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved" (IX). Note the shift in the use of pronouns: it appears Forster identifies with and also wishes his readers to simultaneously grasp with him how Urdu poetry, in the scope of its aesthetic effects, is appreciable by all humans who should have universally felt that existential loneliness, that dismal solipsism that besets each human being. And furthermore, how does Muslim poetry stand as a call to a rival Hindu deity?

I think, unlike Fanon who felt African colonial subjects could be united on "the grounds of nation and sometimes race" (10), Forster might be suggesting art as a means for resisting heterogeneity; aesthetic experience as coterminous with religious experience, a transcendental means of galvanizing mankind towards something greater than ourselves. But art and its effects are never as straightforward as we might like it to be, else all of India, nay, all of the world, would have been united by poetry recitals. Later on in the same passage in IX, Aziz notes that sometimes poetry "only increased his local desires" for women. At the heart of this aesthetic experience is the desire to fully know, and to be fully known by, another person. Yet Forster, throughout his novel, seems to be underscoring the difficultly of this, with the cryptic echo, the ninety-nine names of God, the breakdown of Adele's and Ronny's romance, and the failure of Aziz's and Fielding's friendship. Poetry, given its elliptical nature, expresses itself in terms of an omission, a kind of meaningful void that at first appears meaningless (like the Marabar Caves). Wallace Stevens said that "the nobility of poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without", and I think Forster, in leveraging upon Urdu religious poetry to expose the longings and desires of the soul, consciously resists that violent call to arms that is central to Fanon's essay, and batters the inner self in search of redressal from all the schisms and divisions that keep man and man apart.