Crossing Borders: A "Global World"

As I was reading through Arif Dirlik's "Third World Criticism in the Age of Capitalism" I couldn't help but feel critically nostalgic--feeling as if some of his ideas are rather outdated, or are presented in a fantasized way. 

It is also one I don't necessarily agree with.  There are several issues that beg to be questioned.

Dirlik highlights the fact that capitalism has become decentered and is no longer dominated by Eurocentrism(Postcolonialisms 577).  Because of this the "transnationalization of production is the source at once of unprecedented global unity and the unprecedentied fragmentation in [the] history of capitalism [and] the homogenization of the globe economically, socially, and culturally is such that Marx's predictions finally seem to be on the point of vindication" (Postcolonialisms 578).

I have to disagree with Dirlik on this one.  THERE is no such existence of  unity in global production and cultures.  In fact I would have to argue that the center of capitalism has not really been "decentered" but "recentered" in a place directly across the sea from Europe.  This place my fellow poco scholars would be the United States of America.   The United States has become a culture of capitalistic nature, even worst than what was going on in the 1960's.   The very fact that Black Friday has turned into "Gray Thursday" and "Cyber Monday" is the very proof one needs for the justification of our "bourgeousis" type society.  The poor want to be richer, so they spend money they don't have, to maintain the appearence that they have expensive taste.  Must I continue? The United States my friend is the new capitalist center, which has begun to assert its own imperialist reach across seas, and then some.   Must we be reminded of the factory fire in Bangladesh this past week killing how many workers? Not to mention they were producing American goods. 

The other issue I have with this statement within Dirlik's work is the fact that cultures have become unified.  Really?? In the United States alone, a person of different ethnicity can not go down the street without illiciting a degrading stare from some culturally ignorant hypocrite.  In fact how many hate crimes against ethnic or racial others are commited within the United States in one day? I don't know the exact statistics, but I would have to guess that they are extremely high.  If a country like the United States who is founded upon the ideals of equality and is the supposed "melting pot" of the world is not culturally unifed, then it is no way possible for the world to become one culture. 

With the way the world looks now, I would have to argue that there is no such concept of a "Globalized World" according to the type that Dirlik outlines. I would have to argue that there are Global Superpowers that extend their imperialistic practices to try and colonize our current world.  I do believe that people are intermixing between cultures, and that people are becoming more culurally aware.  Borders are being crossed, yet there are still powerful divsions between North America, Europe, and Asia.  I would argue that each continent is fighting for global control.  AND if that were to happen our culturally "diverse" world would cease to exist and we would all become mindless global capitalist.

I know my views are somewhat negative, but it is because of the current state of our "Global World" that I am doing my best to become a post-colonial scholar.

*****

I had read the entire book of Rushdie short stories in East, West and I must say the two that really stuck out in terms of globalization were "Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies" and "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers." I'm sorry to say but I must make this explication of these text rather short because I have three final papers I need to finish so I will give you my thoughts in a rather short way.

In "Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies" there is emphasis placed on the discussion between Muhammad Ali and Miss Rehena's eyes.   Miss Rehana wishes to leave her cultural home, India.  Muhammad Ali represents cultural purity--or anti-globalization.  He tries over and over again to convince Miss Rehena not to go and argue for a permit to leave, but alas the tempation for Miss Rehana to leave her own poor statis and travel is great.  However, Muhammad Ali knows the power of money and wealth is the equivalent to the passport he is witholding from Miss Rehena.  It can be implied that Ali was in the possession of a forged passport, therefor he was aiming at improving his own pocket wealth through the process of allowing globalization. Overall the story, plays with the concept of identity, and the crossing of borders--eventually Miss Rehena passes the colonial interagation that will alow her to leave.  She passes through the colonial gaze, and gains her ticket to globalization.

In "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers", the concept of global capitalism is at its finest.  The ruby slippers represent one of the most important piece of capitalist propoganda for they come from a movie that would become a global hit, The Wizard of Oz.  When it first premiered in 1939 the movie grossed 3,017,000 dollars (IMDB) but after each realease it gained more and more gross income.  However, whats important is that The Wizard of Oz has become a global icon, to the equivalent of Star Wars. Everyone knows these iconic movies, and the Ruby Slippers are the most iconic.  Everyone has travelled from all over to see and bid for the Ruby Slippers including "politcal refugess, conspirators, deposed monarchs, defeated factions, poets, bandit chieftens" (91).  The people stand and "pools of saliva begin to form" (90).  The low down people, and the higher up people come and are unifed in wanting this one object--a pair of ruby slippers.

However, the most important passage of this short story is the one that reads:
We revere the ruby slippers because we believe theycan make us invulnerable to witches...because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return; and because they shine like the footwear of gods. (92)
There is longing in this passage, a want to revert to what was before.  Yet, it is only through the capitalistic practices that the people can regain their salvation.  To revert from a globalized society, to become something other more defined in ones own culture. 

Both these short stories were awesome, but I have more to say about where I want to go and what I have learned.

*****

 As a post-colonial scholar I feel like we can learn the secrets, and create the vocabulary, that can help us become better global citizens by promoting dialogue between cultures and people that are different.   Some might say that as a White American Male I couldn't possibly succeed in the field of post-colonial studies because I don't understand or live in a post-colonial society. I couldn't possibly understand what it's like to be colonized and fight against the types of injustices that occur everyday in our post-colonial world.  Sometimes I feel like I am intruding in a field that isn't my own cultural inheritance. But then I realize that I know what its like to suffer the colonial gaze, to have the government control my body, to suffer injustice at the ideology of sexual oppression. I also realize that colonization is EVERY person's inheritance in this world.  Afterall, the first humans were nomads who migrated across millions and trillions of frozen Earth to populate it, we are more interconnected than we like to think.  As a post-colonial scholar I want to seek to create healthy cultural relationships, understand the world in terms of its diverse people. I also want to understand sexuality and its place in different cultures.  I want to rectify the division that global capitalism has created within our  every changing world.

Above all though  I want to question the existence of homosexuality in the Arab world, because homosexuality has been such a major issue in my own world. 

This is where I see myself going as a post-colonial scholar.

As for now, I will continue my journey to understanding our post-colonial world.

Colonized Desire: "S/he yearns for two things only: To be loved, of course, and to be safe."

There are those in the Post-colonial world of theory that believe that homosexuality doesn't exist in the colonized world.  In fact theorist, like Franz Fanon and Joseph A. Massad, believe that homosexuality in the colonized world is, and was, a product of colonial taint, enforced upon the indigenous people by the colonizers.   However, I like to think that homosexuality did exist in the world of the colonized way before the Europeans showed up—sexual acts between people of the same sex were normal, not questioned as obscene, nor even given a name.  In fact love between two men, or women, was considered the purest form of love.   It is only when Europeans showed up and introduced the politics of heterosexism that are completely ingrained in post-colonial societies today, where the violence and persecution against homosexuals is extremely violent.  In doing so, the colonizers declared that sexual relations between people of the same sex were abhorrent homosexual acts condemned by the religious doctrines of Christianity.

Whatever the case, somewhere along the line the concepts of sex and gender became completely misconstrued, and policing of sexuality in the post-colonial world is a result of this misconstruing. 

The Caribbean is a post-colonial society where sexuality is policed through gendered behavior.  In fact the Caribbean is a special place when it comes to colonization and sexuality, because it is a place full of people from many cultural backgrounds—both West and East—who have different views when it comes to sexual behavior.  Because the Caribbean was a place of violent colonization and decolonization, sex became the new way to either control—whether it is colonization or decolonization.

Before I get to the readings for this week, I’d like to introduce some of my own theory on the way sexuality is constructed within the Caribbean.  I build off of the works of social oppression theorists to construct the way in which sexuality can be understood within the Caribbean.

Here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote on sexuality within the Caribbean. It focuses on the way homosexual men are forced into a space of sexual hybridity within the nation of Cuba.  I am in no way assuming that the way homosexuality is treated in Cuba is the way it is treated for the entirety of the Caribbean.  The colonial story varies from country to country.  However, several nations have created laws against homosexuality, and more times than not, homosexuals are forced to hide their sexuality through gendered behavior. 

You will notice in my paper that I bring up the concept of sexual hybridity, and I explain the reason why homosexual men are forced into this space of sexual enunciation.   

To better understand this concept I would like to focus on two of the readings for this week.  The first is one of my personal heroes and role model, Reinaldo Arenas.  For those who don’t know who Arena’s is, I suggest you read the rest of his memoirs, or see the movie, Before Night Falls.   “Eroticism” is a chapter from these memoirs.  To make a long, and important, story short Arenas was a political hero for homosexuals in Cuba.  He fought long and hard to write novels against the Castro Regime—ironically a regime he helped put into power.  Many of his manuscripts were confiscated by police, as well as homosexual men who were “supposedly” his friends.  Arenas was exiled to the United States in the Mariel Boat Lift in 1980—Castro finally gave those who wanted to leave, who he called the scum of the Earth, the permission to do so.

I hope you take the opportunity to learn more about Arenas because he was truly an amazing person. 

“Eroticism” was the first piece I read of Arenas, and it helped form the topic for my undergraduate colloquium paper.  Plus, it helped me decide where I want to situate myself in the field of post-colonial studies—homosexuality within the post-colonial world.  I’d like to point out that Arenas uses autobiographical anecdotal writing to create a gay aesthetic—this process is what Audre Lorde first called biomythography.  Biomythography combines narrative form with autobiographical form to convey one’s own personal life with other homosexuals—somewhat similar to the mbari process.  It is used to celebrate queer life within the Caribbean by uniting, and embracing other homosexuals.  

The first autobiographical anecdote that Arena describes in “Eroticism” is of a young male who he and his friend Tomasito La Goyesca met while on a bus.  Arena’s narrates that “the young man had signaled Tomasito several times and touched his very erect penis. [But] when Tomasito grabbed it, the man reacted violently, beat him up, and called him, and all of us queers” (34).  From this little bit of narration, it is clear that the man was obviously interested in both Arena and Tomasito, yet when approached for a sexual handout he was unable to cross the liminal threshold and identify as a homosexual man even though his erect penis said otherwise.  Arena later narrates that Tomasito had accidently switched wallets with the violent man who turned out to be “an official of the Ministry of the Interior” (34).  

Arena comments that “[This] man, who was persecuting us for being gay, probably wanted nothing more than for us to grab his penis, rub it, and suck it right then. Perhaps this kind of aberration exists in all repressive systems” (35).  Arena is not only describing the psychological oppression that the official was facing, but that something was preventing him from acting out what was obviously his same-sex sexual desire. It also shows that even people in power during the revolution were forced to act out the laws of nationalism.   In this case the official was acting out his repression through violence because of his inability to cross the liminal threshold into same-sex desire, a product of his place within the government.

Another place where Arena describes the representation of sexual hybridity and gender identification is when he is the recipient of a brutal beating by a man he has had sex with.  Arena recounts this violent memory and says that:

Things were settled with a look, asking for a cigarette...The young man accepted, and once  inside my room, surprisingly asked me to play the role of the    man. Actually that gave me pleasure to, and the man went down on me.  I fucked him and enjoyed it like a convict. Then, still naked, he asked me, “And if anybody catches us here, who is the man?” He meant who fucked whom. I replied perhaps a little cruelly, “Obviously, I am  the man, since I stuck into you.” This enraged the young man…and he started to throw     me against the low ceiling…I was getting an awful beating… [and] I was afraid to die. (41)

Arena shows that even the physical act of sex doesn’t escape the oppressive chains of heterosexism and gender identity.  Masculinity is equaled to the act of performance and insertion, and femininity is labeled as submissive and receiving. Because Arena challenged the young man’s masculinity he was seen as challenging the systems of gender that embody the physical act of sex.   Arena himself identifies his act as that of a “convict” because he is taking away his sexual partner’s masculinity. This results in sexual hybridity being forced upon both participants through gender identification, and sexual freedom is denied from taking place.

The final part of “Eroticism” Arena describes, in autobiographical form, the setbacks he faced while writing down his memoirs, manuscripts, and novels.  He writes that “By the year 1969 I was already being subjected to persistent harassment by State Security, and I feared for the manuscripts I was continually writing” (49). He juxtaposes the appropriation of his writing by the government, to how the sea “[was] a way to escape from the land where were repressed; perhaps in floating on the waves we escaped our cursed insularity” (49).    His writing served as a way to express the repression he was experiencing at the hands of gay men and the government which wreaked havoc on his sexual identity.   Because he was making his voice known, and not conforming to sexual repression, he became visible as betraying the gender of the nation.  So because his writing was compromised—an intimate part of his identity—the sea, a place separate from land/nation, was the only escape from the daunting confines of heterosexism.  

The second reading that I would like to focus on for this post is Thomas Glave’s “Whose Caribbean? An Allegory, in Part.” Thomas Glave is from Jamaica and is an activist who fights for gay rights.  In fact, he helped create an organization called the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays( J-FLAG).  He is also the editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing From the Antilles—the first anthology of Gay Caribbean Literature.  (The readings for this week come from this book, which I am extremely fond of!).   

This short allegory/political speech is full of questions on sexuality, gender, and democracy.  However, it’s interesting that Glave would use the term allegory, because it is significant to a National allegory—which connects both heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. (Refer to my blog post on National thought).  I call it a speech because it switches from narrative to speech half way through the text.  But what is most interesting is that Glave manifest the concept of sexual hybridity through his narrator/protagonist.  The manifestation of sexual hybridity functions as a way to unite both sexes—in essence a connection between homosexuality and heterosexuality.  In the very beginning the narrator states:

 I am fairly certain…that the child was both female and male—a common enough occurrence in that place of the child’s origin at that time, as, contrary to numerous  prevailing opinions, happens frequently today. The child—let us know him/her as “s/he”—possessed a slender penis of startingly delicate gree…s/he also possessed a pair of luminous blue breasts…The child also possessed a vagina and uterus, which, as was             common knowledge among all who knew him/her, produced at least two or three times     per year (Glave 177).

Glave uses gendered pronouns and connects the two, but let us remember that gender is a social creation so by doing so Glave is deconstructing the binary of he and she by combining the two. A manifestation of sexual hybridity through gendered pronouns.  WOW!!! He also uses physical reproductive organs, penis and uterus, to "re-gender" a human being. Glave, as a gay political activists is “Hope[s] that [they] could engender social and political change in a nation that , broadened through [their] efforts, would ultimately be worthy of all Jamaicans:a nation welcoming to all, irrespective of sexuality and perceived gender transgressions.

As I was reading through Glave's narrative, I reverted back to Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot speak.  Maybe I reacted too harshly to this idea. Even though I am gay I live in a society where I can express it freely without fear of consequence.  I must say I have to reformulate my own opinion on this subject.  If sexual hybridity exists, and homosexuals are forced to conceal their sexuality within the space of sexual enunciation then in fact they cannot speak authentically—thanks Cait Turner for making me question this.  They are forced to share “Darkness and silence…For all time….un-voicedness, complete despair” (Glave 179).  They can only demonstrate their sexuality—which in essence serves as their “voicedness”—through heterosexual norms.  However, Glave by “gathering” these narratives, poems, and speeches work to give an authentic voice that isn't suppressed or colonized by heterosexism. Instead their voices work to un-colonize their sexual desire which is policed through gender and sexual politics. 

Homosexual desire in the colonial world is often met with forceful resistance.  It is often considered disgusting, taboo, and unnatural.  It isn't that homosexuality doesn't exist in the colonial world. Instead it is re-colonized by the colonized. Therefore, sexuality, a significant aspect of culture, is appropriated and distorted so that it can never be purely the same. 

An Eye for an Eye: The Violent Colonial Gaze in The Battle of Algiers

The colonial gaze, in my opinion, is the most important part of any colonial discourse.  As a post-colonial theorist it is vital to understand the colonial gaze—because it plays a major role in colonization and the interactions that ensue after different cultures and peoples come in contact.  The colonial gaze defines the ways in which the colonizer visually and psychologically portrays the colonized and vice versa.  However, the colonial gaze can be hard to understand because of its visible and invisible representations.  When I say it has invisible representations, I mean the psychological implications that influence the actions of both the colonizer and the colonized.  We already know from our readings that the colonial gaze plays a vital role in colonization, but it also plays a major role in decolonization—the colonized invert the gaze and use it as a weapon against colonial authority.  For this blog post I would like to focus on the physical inversion of the colonial gaze so that it functions as a weapon for decolonization.      

I’ve briefly touched on the concept of the colonial gaze before, and I have provided many textual examples to help understand its place in colonial discourse.  However, I find understanding it visually is the best way to understand the implications of such a powerful weapon of colonization—and in this case decolonization.   Therefore, let us turn to a movie that represents the colonial gaze as a violent weapon for decolonization—the 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers. For those of you who don’t know, The Battle of Algiers is about the fight for the city of Algiers between the colonial French and the colonized people of Algiers.  This movie is full of scenes that depict the colonial gaze that takes place between the colonized and the colonizer.  However, there is one particular sequence of scenes that I would like to focus on when it comes to this concept.

These scenes focus on a sequence of bombings which are carried out by three Arab women whose men are part of the FLN—an anti-colonial group that aims at taking back the city of Algiers from colonial authority by any means necessary.  This link will take you to the scenes I am most interested in examining—sorry I was unable to fully embed the video into this blog post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hYtN2zWX8c

I’d like to point out a few things before I explicate these scenes. 

 Because the colonial gaze was used to imprison and incriminate the colonized—Ali La Pointe’s own personal flashbacks  within the movie show his own troubles with  colonial authority because his “visual” difference as an Arab could be seen—the colonized soon realized the power of the colonial gaze and how it might be made into a weapon. 

The first step in undoing the gaze was through purification.  In the movie, this was done by the Algiers by first upholding their own moral and religious values as Muslims from the taint of colonialism—all people must give up their corrupt colonial behavior that has come to permeate their Arab society.  If we remember in Leila Ahmed’s work we read about how certain radical religious groups in post-colonial societies often used violent laws and behavior to purify the colonized society from colonial infection. One scene depicts a group of children beating a publically drunk man to death.  This is a prime example of what Ahmed describes.  The second part of decolonization within the movie, and perhaps the most important part of inverting the colonial gaze, to make it a weapon, is mimicry. 

 Now we can begin the explication of these scenes.   

Remember in his article “Of Mimicry and Man” Homi Bhabha explains the duality or ambivalence that the colonized experience.  Bhabha argued that it was through ambivalence that the indigenous destroyed the authority of colonial powers and recognized their own strength.  It is through this ambivalence that the colonial gaze is inverted and made a weapon for decolonization.

In the sequence of scenes above, it first opens on a room with three Algieran women.   Each is combing her hair, and then suddenly and violently they chop their hair short and dye it a lighter shade.  You can see the colonial gaze in the women's eyes as they hold the scissors to their hair in front of the mirror. The scissors serve as the physical undoing of the colonial gaze as they cut away the colonized  identity. They mimic the colonizer in appearence and play act the loyal colonial subject.  Suddenly, the colonial gaze becomes self reflexive. They become the docile and loyal colonial subjects. However, this is only in appearance, because their ultimate goal is to blow up a French soda shop, a French dance hall, and a French airport.  Let me remind you that they do so willingly, and because it is only a woman who can now penetrate and invert the colonial gaze—women were seen as harmless and helpless therefore they couldn’t possibly carry out acts of violence and terror, men were seen as the ones with power.  But at the same time they became that which the colonial authority wanted to see, even though they were blind to the true motives of the colonized.  Thus, the colonial gaze is inverted through the visible/invisible ambivalence of mimicry and made a physical weapon for decolonization. 

I’d like to make one more explication of the colonial gaze within The Battle of Algiers.  The colonial gaze is often seen as extremely violent.  Violence begets violence, and the old saying “An eye for an eye” becomes the motto of both colonial authority and the colonized.  The more the colonial gaze pierces the subconscious of the colonizer and the colonized the more violent the interaction becomes.  The colonizer is further convinced that the colonized need to be controlled and civilized.  The colonized is further convinced that it doesn’t need to be repressed by the colonial gaze.  Thus the concept of relativism is destroyed all together and peaceful reconciliation can no longer be achieved.  Violence begets violence, and all become dehumanized.  The colonial gaze ceases to exist or becomes extremely hypersensitive.  The colonized become the colonizers and the colonizers become the colonized.

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Abstracts

Here are two abstracts of critical essays that have to do with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.  The first is an essay on Chinua Achebe and what influenced him as a writer.  The second has to do with the duality of individual/collective memory within Things Fall Apart.

Gikandi, Simon. “Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature.” Things Fall Apart: A Norton Critical Edition. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. 297-303. Print.

            This article seeks to examine the context in which Chinua Achebe’s novel was written by outlining the circumstances in which the novel was written—what was going on in Nigeria at the time—and the outside forces that helped shaped its creation.  The essay first examines the challenges that faced Achebe when it came to publishing his novel—his only finished manuscript was sent to London and ignored for almost an entire year, after which Achebe sent it to William Heinemann who published it in 1958 after much speculation and misgivings.  Gikandi points out that only 2,000 copies were first published—which doesn’t seem like much given the popularity it has received gaining the title of the first African novel.  However, Gikandi highlights that many people think that Things Fall Apart was the first written/published African novel, but others came before him by writers such as Casely Hayford, Sol Plaatje, and Amos Tutuola.  What made Things Fall Apart so popular, and helped it achieve the title of the first African novel, was that Achebe had written it at a crucial time in Nigeria’s own history—the end of its domination by colonial rule.  Therefore, Things Fall Apart could be considered a testament as what to do after decolonization had begun, even though Gikandi says that unlike other African writers Achebe did not want to reject colonial history altogether.  Instead, Achebe saw the written word as a powerful colonial legacy to be used by the colonized—by fusing African oral storytelling traditions with the written European novel.  Gikandi points out that the Achebe’s own family history played an important role in colonial history—Achebe’s great grandfather was the first to receive Chirstian missionaries in the village of Ogidi.  The most important part of this article is where Gikandi highlights how literature shaped Achebe’s own view of the world, as well as his own view of his people.   Therefore, past and present helped shaped Achebe’s novel which would become the most famous novel to come out of Africa.

 Irele, F. Abiola. “The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.”Things Fall Apart: Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Francis Abiola Irele. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. 453-91. Print.

Within this article, Irele Abiola gives an explication on the narrative discourse of Things Fall Apart so that one can understand that it functions on the principle of duality that exists between the individual/collective experience as well as the relationship between writer/society.By analyzing certain moral dilemmas that take place within the story, Abiola focuses on the fact of whether or not Okonkwo’s moral/ethical struggles are representative of one individual or whether or not they represent the collective consciousness of Igbo life and history. Abiola creates a clear distinction between Achebe’s personal beliefs and the beliefs the novel represents and or manifests through its characters—the novel almost works as a meta-consciousness or extension of the author’s own understanding of certain morals and ethics particular to his society which is critical to African oral tradition. In doing so, Abiola shows that reality becomes represented as fiction, and the struggles of the individual become symbolic for the collective African experience.However, what is curious to note is that Abiola points out that the African experience is not just particular to Africans. Instead Achebe reaches across the space of “cultural proximity” (a concept that is somewhat simalr to "cultural enunciation) to create a novel in which the human experience—moral/ethic struggles—can be understood as collective. The author concludes his essay by saying thatThings Fall Apart can be understood as a historical epic tragedy, and as such it challenges the concepts of space and time by examining the human condition—an act that that makes the individual experience part of the collective human experience.

Mbari: A Ritual Celebration

"The mbari process is an act of cosmic renewal, a harmonization of opposing forces, a fusion through materials and workers of the real world, the sky world, and the underworld, and, above all a celebration of life" (Rosalind Hackett, Art and Religion in Africa, 153).



Reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe for the second time is like greeting a friend one hasn't seen in a while.  In fact, I was ecstatic at being able to pick the book up again because I haven't read it since my undergraduate World Literature Class.  Out of any poco book I have read this one holds a great place in my heart because it is the book that changed my college life forever.  After reading it the first time, I knew exactly what it was I wanted to study for the rest of my life.   Things Fall Apart baptised me into the field of Post-colonial studies--I say baptised because I underwent a spirtual change,one that I can't even explain in words, a change that made me want to become a post-colonial scholar.

With that said, I want to approach this post differently--I could explain all the ways in which Achebe tries to un-make the image of the "savage" African, but I feel this has been done many times and then some.  I did so myself after my first encounter, but I want to touch on another important concept.  Plus in doing so, we have missed an important aspect of this brilliant novel which can be seen as a celebration of African Life.

What do I mean by this idea of celebration, and how does it apply to Things Fall Apart?

First off, I want to highlight the fact that Achebe was scrutinized for writing this novel in English--we read about this during the week in which we read about language and colonization.  In doing so some clamied that this novel was not truly a piece of "African" literature.  Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o  was one of his biggest critics.

After reading Things Fall Apart for the first time, I had a literature theory class in which we read an excerpt from Achebe's The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays during the time we covered post-colonial theory.  In this group of essays Achebe, challenges Thinog'o's assertion that his novel was not truly African Literature because it was tainted with the language of the colonizers.    One important concept that Achebe embraces is the concept of Mbari, a practice that every African writer/artist should do when writing and or creating a work of authentic African art. However, he doesn't explain what this concept is, and there is an important reason why. 


SO what is Mbari, and why didn't Achebe explain it, and how can we view Mbari in terms of Achebe's Things Fall Apart?  AND is Things Fall Apart an authentic piece of African Literature?
I will now try to answer these important questions.


Mbari is a ritual and an object (and as such is spirtual/religious) that the Owerri Igbo have been doing before even the time of colonization (Hackett Art and Religion in Africa 150). In order to do the ritual, however, certain shrines were built as places of sacrifice for the earth god  Ala, and "the decision to erect an mbari constitutes a response to a major crises in the community...it is essentially a religious affair in that it is a sacrifice, serving to rebind the community to its deity" (Hackett 150).   Some consider the importance of mbari relies firmly on the process rather than on its form (Hackett 150).  Mbari consists of several stages: the acknowledgment of participation in which a pact is made between the artists and priests, the collection of yam mbari where artist construct clay figures of humans and animals and the first figure is always mishappened when formed to dispel evil, and then a date is set for the testing of whether or not the sacrifice is accepted (Hackett 150-151).  It is curious to note that modern acts of Mbari, European plates, which are also called mbari, are included in the shrine (Hackett 151).   The final stage takes place at night, and all the clay figures are transferred into the most inner part of the shrine, and before the workers leave they cast of all their clothes and pray for evil to leave their bodies (Hackett 150).  The most important part is that the workers do not acknowledge their own part in mbari once they have finished the act (Hackett 150).

This concept of mbari may be strange to our Western senses, but I feel that by understanding mbari, its cultural aesthetic as a artistic object, as well as a cultural process of restoration.

Now that I have outlined, in a very simpliefied way, Mbari I think it important to return to Achebe and the concept of African Literature.   From what we learned before it is obvious that Achebe embraces English and uses it as a weapon against Europeans, but what's most important to the concept of African Literature is the process of Mbari.  Achebe thinks that in order for a piece of literature or art to be authentically African the artists must enact the process of mbari.


With all that said Things Fall Apart is an authentic piece of African art.  It is an object of Mbari, and it is also functions as the process of mbari that serves to cleanse the thoughts of both African and Europeans of the dangers of viewing Africa as the dark and savage continent. 

Achebe creates an authentic piece of African literature by using the process of mbari which can be understood as such:

1) Achebe acknowledges the act of mbari, by first acknowledging that Africa existed before the Europeans even arrived. He outlines a civilized society--one that includes an economy, a work ethic, gender/sex roles, and even a political hiearchy.  Thus the process of mbari is initiated.
2) Achebe collects/creates the yam mbari by creating African characters that are civilized and cultured and have a very clear sense of one's society.   However, he keeps one character misshapen and flawed.  This can be seen through the character Okonkwo.   Okonkwo is a noble man, but he is one with a temper and the inability to understand or accept change. Not to mention, he is a tad prideful, even though he started off with nothing to his name.
3) Achebe moves the mbari into the most innersanctum--this can be understood in the terms of the white men invading the lives of the Igbo tribes, because in the process of mbari even Europeans were included.
4) Finally, Achebe achieves this ritual cleansing by undoing all the stereotypes and colonial attitudes toward Africa.  Okonkwo serves as Achebe's mbari sacrifice--he represents the destruction of a civilized society, yet he also represents away to connect to one's cultural past.

I hope I have done some justice in defending Achebe's creation of authentic African art.  After all his novel can be seen as a ritual of harmonization and cleansing of European thought and colonialization. 

The Objectified Woman: Locating the Voice of the Colonized Woman

 

 

 

Object-n.

1. a tangible and visible thing

2. a person or thing seen as a focus or target for feelings, thought, etc: an object of affection

3. an aim, purpose, or objective

4. informal  a ridiculous or pitiable person, spectacle, etc

5. philosophy that towards which cognition is directed, as contrasted with the thinking subject; anything regarded as external to the mind, esp. in the external world

(Dictionary.com)

Woman. Woman is a simple word, and a tangible being that has excited controversy within the minds of many.  Depending on what creation story one believes in, it is always the body of the woman that has taken center stage.  Yes, men it is time we got off our egotistical high horses and give credit where it’s due.  Because let’s face it, without woman we just wouldn’t and couldn’t exist.  That still doesn’t account however that woman has been treated as an object, a spectacle, a target, something visible—notice the definition of object above because it’s crucial to understanding this post.    

 

I know I write from the position of gay man, and that I sympathize more with women then I do men, however, I understand what it’s like to be objectified because of my gender preference.  Keep that in mind when I give my spiel on the objectification and colonization of women.

 

With that said, it’s a wonder that we live in a world of patriarchal hegemony. (Italics added for emphasis which denotes disgust).    The current state of woman affairs in the world, as well as within our country, is one to be scoffed at, and should leave anyone wondering how we should situate ourselves within the context of these horrendous behaviors, beliefs, and acts.  It’s 2012 in the USA and we’re still arguing about the rights of woman to make changes within and outside their own bodies.  Not to mention we have politicians that can say politically offensive/incorrect phrases such as “Binders full of women” or that “Rape is a legitimate form of conception.”   And finally the thing that really gets me steamed, and I must admit extremely sad at the same time, is that a grown man can get onto a bus to put a bullet in the head of an unarmed girl who refused to be cowed into submission because she believed education should be a right entitled to all regardless of one’s sex or gender. 

All of these current arguments surround the issue of the woman body and  how it has been objectified and oppressed.

 

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD!!?!??? Sometimes I’d really like to give men a reality check.  Granted, there are still a few good guys out there. This website alone proves it…..http://goodmenproject.com/category/noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz/.  Take a look if you have a chance because I’m sure this will give you hope for the dominant masculine mentality that seems to be plaguing our existence as humans.

 

But why women?

These issues surrounding the woman body are nothing new, in fact they can go all the way back to creation.  However, the true time and place in which “Women” truly became glorified objects of subjugation is during……………………………..you guessed it, the time of colonization. 

Let’s take a look at Oyeronkey Oyemumi’s “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and

Colonialism.”  Oyemumi states that “the colonizer differentiated between male and female bodies and acted accordingly.  Men were the primary target of policy, and, as such, they were the natives and so were visible….The colonial process was sex differentiated insofar as the colonizers were male and used gender identity to determine policy…Native women occupied the residual and unspecified category of the Other” (Postcolonialisms 340).  Thus colonization was a process of objectification, making things visible, and or invisable.  Women were made inferior and objectified because of their supposed inferior gender.   Oyemumi also states that there were “two vital and intertwined processes inherent in European colonization of Africa. The first…[the] racializing and the attendant inferiorization of Africans as the colonized, the natives. The second process…the inferiorazation of females…the process of inferiorizing the native…was bound up with the process of enthroning male hegemony” (Postcolonialisms 355).    Women were both objectified, by first making them visible, and then second making them invisible.  A strict binary of Male/Female was constructed, even though Oyemumi states that Women were chiefs and acted as leaders within their own social spheres.  Women were the primary target of colonial rule because they were seen as a visible threat.

 

However Oyemumi’s view of colonization of women was specific to Nigerian women.  Leila Ahmed offers a second view of how colonization affected the women of the East.    Ahmed states that:

Even as Victorian male establishment devised theories to contest the claims of feminism, and derided and rejected the ideas of feminism and the notion of men’s oppressing women with respect to itself, it captured the language of feminism and redirected it in the service of colonialism, toward Other men and the cultures of Other men. It was here and in the combining of languages of colonialism and feminism that the fusion between the issues of woman and culture was created. More exactly, what was created was the fusion between the issues of women, their oppression and the cultures of Other men. The idea that Other men, men in colonized societies beyond the borders of the civilized West, oppressed women was to be used, in the rhetoric of colonialism, to render morally justifiable its project of undermining or eradicating the cultures of colonized peoples. (Postcolonialisms 321)

 

Here Ahmed presents another side of objectification, women were seen as needing to be saved, which in turn creates a second oppression.  Arab Islamists saw women as the reason for their so called colonization at the hands of Europeans, thus “issues of culture and women are connected” so that women become the objects of a second colonization. Woman was made a spectacle, an object, and a living testimonial for colonization.   Her looks, her garb, and body were all examined through a “fetishsized” lens.  At the center of these two accounts of colonized women is male domination of the gendered female body.  Both of these issues are at the heart of our current world problems when it comes to the woman body, something which we can blame history for. But what’s most important is the fact that what can be noted through both these theorists is that Women were categorized as inferior and subaltern. 

 

This leads me to the most important part of this post—Gaytri Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern woman cannot speak within her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.  I would first like to say that, as much as I understand Spivak’s grandiose and somewhat elitist vision, I must beg to differ.  The subaltern woman can speak, just like the subaltern homosexual, the subaltern peasant, and so on….  Each has a voice, but before I get to my own opinion let’s consider what Spivak has to say.

Spivak states that “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization….There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak….The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (307-308).  Let us remember that Spivak writes from an elitist position, a position that enables her to assume and postulate, so it would come as no surprise that she would propose and assert the thesis that the subaltern cannot speak.   She’s warranted in saying that capitalization and colonization create a thing-i-fication, a modernization of people into objects and machines, forced into spaces of in-betweens.   One can understand the influences of Marxism within her argument.  

However, Spivak falls into the trap of universalism.  She focuses on religion, capitalism, and colonization as universal forms of oppression, exacting the same story for all women and the subaltern.  She objectifies them; just as much as the anthropological discourses she tries to understand objectify the women she seems not to give a name or any specification other then then those who suffer from Widow burning.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty warns against this type of thought—the idea of universalism. Mohanty says that feminist theorist tend to group women into one universal group who all occupy an inherent space of stasis that is defined by a universal group oppression (Under Western Eyes 347).  WHAT A MOUTH FULL, but one that provides extremely useful proof as to how we can challenge such an assumption that the subaltern woman cannot speak.  Because I think this thesis begs to be challenged and that it is just as hegemonic and powerful as the forces that colonized and objectified women in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong I truly understand where Spivak is coming from, and I commend her for a wonderful piece on the objectification of women.  But she is in danger of coming way to close to the acceptance of the single story, the essentialist view of universalism.  Maybe I am a little biased being a homosexual male. But I can tell you that genderization objectifies my very existence.  In all truth, I am subaltern the lowest part of society, inferiorized by capitalism, and cultural imperialism.   Women have rights, they may be few, but I can certainly attest that gays are at the bottom of the heap.  However, I sure as hell have a voice, a voice that I refuse to silence. And if anyone wants to assert that I can’t speak, I dare you.  Maybe it’s time I used my voice and speak up against injustices like Malala.

 

I would like to finish this post with a look at a passage from Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi in hopes that this can prove the subaltern woman can speak, and that to do so can cause great harm and even death to those have understood the implications of objectification.   

 

This passage that I would like to focus on is Firdaus final words to the narrator who has gotten Firdaus to tell her story.  AHA we already have a basis for the concept that the subaltern woman can speak! Firdaus tells of her final act of sexual prostitution with an Arab prince, and in doing so tells of how she discovered the truth behind the male sex, and their masculinized male domination. Firdaus admits of her murder, and an interrogation takes place, but one in which the subaltern woman speaks the truth of defiance and literally tears down the mask of objectification and domination.

 The passage goes like this:

 

‘I am a killer, but I’ve committed no crime. Like you, I kill only criminals’

‘But he is a prince, and a hero. He’s not a criminal’

‘For me feats of kings and princes are no more than crimes, for I do not see things the way you do’

 ‘You are a criminal.’ They said, ‘and your mother is a criminal’

‘My mother was not a criminal. No woman can be a criminal. To be a criminal one must be a man.’

 ‘Now look here, what is this that you are saying?’

 ‘I am saying that you are criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands, the pimps, the lawyers, the doctors, the journalists, and all men of all professions’

They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman’

‘I am speaking the Truth. And truth is savage and dangerous’. (Saadawi 109-110)

 

If we, as poco theorist, accept Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern woman cannot speak, then we lose the empowerment of Firdaus speech.  We should then ignore this speech altogether. But we won’t and we must and can reject this notion of an “unspeakable” other.  It is only when we listen, that we can truly understand the voice of the invisible woman because Firdaus is making herself visible with this defiant speech.  Firdaus flips patriarchy on its head and exclaims that it is not women who are inferior but men because they are materialistic and objectify women through masculine domination.    Firdaus exclaims right after that “I was the only woman who had torn the mask away, and exposed the face of their ugly reality” (Saadawi 110)   Perhaps the true veil is not one worn by the women, but the veil of invisibility cast on women that prevents them from understanding the truth—the truth behind the savage subjugation of women by the hands of men.  The veil is inverted, torn away, so that it does not conceal but reveal.   

Woman can speak, and she has a voice that is every bit as powerful as the discourses that objectify and universalize her body.  Instead of writing theory on the basis of her non-existent voice, maybe we should focus on promoting theory that aims at trying to understand the every present voice that is uniquely woman, and promoting theory that aims at supporting voices that have all ready sounded throughout the world.

 

Here's to you Malala, the greatest voice the world has ever heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 





"I come from a land, from a far away place" The Barbaric Notion of Orientalism

When I was a kid, my sisters and I liked to play dress up.  We had a bin that was full of costumes in every size shape and color. The more we could shed our everyday appearances the further we would be able to dive into our own imaginations. Wigs, jewelry, and capes awaited our transformation.   

 I loved to be anything from what I considered far away lands, specifically the mystical and fantastical land of Agrabah. It doesn't come as a surprise then that my favorite person to transform into was Disney's Aladdin.  I had a costume for when Aladdin was an ordinary "street rat" and one for when Aladdin was "Prince Ali Bhabha."  I even had the cassette tape for the Aladdin soundtrack.  My sisters and I would dress up and put on a show pretending that we were the citizens in a land far away, pretending to be people we had no understanding of.  We donned ourselves with baubles, , capes, and of course the most important part of our costumes were our headdresses.   The only way I was truly Aladdin, in the identity of "Prince Ali Bhabha was when I wrapped a towel around my head which I would then pin together with a feather and jewel.  I even went as far as penciling a fake thin lined beard and mustache.

Fascination, wonder, and exoticism were concepts I associated with becoming something other then myself.  I loved it, and the Eastern world fascinated me in a way that was indescribable.  One thing is clear that my fascination was of a unnatural type, a fascination that was instilled on me by outside forces. 

It is terrifying now to look back and realize that I was participating in a legacy that was far beyond my own understanding. It was a construction so powerful that it invaded the inner most recesses of my young naive mind, and planted the seeds of racism and prejudice.

What I experienced as a small child then was what Mr. Edward Said would call the concept of Orientalism.

It would take several, perhaps even a hundred posts to even do Said justice.  So for this post I would like to clarify Said's definition of Orientalism.  After all, we post-colonial scholars/critics owe Said for the work he contributed to our field of study. 

The first and most important part of Said's definition of Orientalism is that it "is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either....There for as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other" (Postcolonialisms 74).  Here Said is saying that the concept, or notion of Orientalism, is unnatural, something that has been created by humans, specifically European and American.
Second, Said is distinguishing that in order for Orientalism to exist, in must do so in the form of a binary, but not an ordinary binary.  Instead like he says, they "support and reflect" each other.  A gaze that works both ways, a gaze which reflects itself, a mirror of sorts.  What Said is hinting at, but doesn't actually come out and say it in this passage is the theoretical notion of the "colonial gaze."  One exists because the other acknowledges the other, and because of that acknowledgment they exist here as well as there.  Thus, Orientalism is a product of Europe's "colonial gaze."  The colonial gaze thrives on this distinction, this creation of other, however Orientalism has become a term that has come to embody all of the East, creating not a mass group of countries, but a mass group of people.   People who are very much different in their many cultures and countries, but because of the consuming concept of Orientalism are made to represent the standard concept of the other.

Said says that the reason Orientalism survives is because it's a system that has penetrated both the cultures East/West. Through repetitive and consistent reproduction it is able to survive from it's historical vantage point to its present historical point.  America has become the new Europe, and the Orient is still viewed through this dominant binary.   Orientalism is a practice, instilled through academia, science and art, and because of this they are part of a larger system of domination (Postcolonialisms 75).  Therefore as Said says "Orientalism is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory, and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment" (Postcolonialisms 75).

Through materialism Orientalism thrives, my childhood experiences assert this notion that Said categorizes as the root of Orientalism.  Because I saw the certain physical and Otherized representations of  a people I had no association with I created a fake and distorted fantasy in my childhood head.  Little did I know that these representations were the repercussions of a powerful binary.


I have only touched the surface of Said's research, but I hope I have provided a clear understanding of his definition of Orientalism.


For the time being, here's two video for you to muse over, and some questions to think about.

                           What do the lyrics of this song suggest?  What types of words are used?
*Disney changed the theatrical lyrics, these are the original lyrics.  Why do you think they changed them?

How many different Orientalisms are presented? What shapes and sizes? How do they dress? How do they act? What does this say about the Westernized view of the East?  What effect does this have on people who have no recollection of what the Orient is?  How does it effect our conscious?

Post-colonial Hybridity and the Space of Cultural Enunciation

"The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about the identity and self hood and culture and belief. How does newness enter the world?" (Joseph Anton 72)  
-----Salman Rushdie

As I am reading Rushdie's memoirs, Joseph Anton, I can't help coming back to this idea of migration, one in which Rushdie categorizes as a time of change between culture and self hood.  Because if one looks at it a certain way, colonial expansion can be seen as a mass movement or migration throughout a world that was suddenly not just one dimensional. Instead new frontiers and places were discovered.  Thus out of a mass migration this notion of East/West was created that established a very rigid colonial binary of self/other.  Because of migration and the blending of cultures and societies this static binary became more flaccid and flexible allowing room for exploration of the self and the other culture coming into contact with that self. 

Last week I focused on the poco concept of mimicry.   One can not describe mimicry without also understanding the post-colonial phenomenon of hybridity--two terms that Homi Bhabha intricately links together.  

So let's begin to decipher what hybridity is, using what know about mimicry. 

If mimicry is the act of, shall we say mockery and or camouflage to be accepted by what was considered the superior culture, then hybridity can best be understood in terms of the change that takes place in one's identity--whether it be the colonized or the colonizer--when certain contact zones are breached and or transversed during colonial expansion.  In other words the colonized or colonizer become something new or other in which two cultures and identities are fused together.
In order to understand post-colonial hybridity it is important to first understand the idea of space--specifically colonial space.   This space is where "Bhabha contends that all culture statements and systems are constructed...the "Third Space of enunciation" (Key Concepts in Poco Studies 118).  To get to this "space of enunciation" the colonized or the colonizer must first pass through what Bhabha calls a liminal space, or a space of transculturalism.   Mimicry therefore can be considered the first step in the creation of hybridity because it is the first act of crossing through a liminal space into the space of enunciation.   But once this liminal space or threshold has been crossed the colonized and colonizer are changed for ever.

Thus a great change takes place that has many different consequences when it comes to the concept of hybridity.  But we must remember that hybridity begins when newness enters the colonial world. 

So what type of changes take place, and what are the different implications of becoming a post-colonial hybrid?

To understand this question it is best again to take a look at Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions.  Within the novel there are three different types of hybridity/hybrid experiences that correlate to specific characters, and they offer a perspective into what types of hybrids exists and the challenges that face cultural hybrids.


The first cultural hybrid that exists within the novel is Maiguru.   Maiguru is an example of a cultural hybrid who has crossed the liminal threshold and was able to reach a space of cultural enunciation, only to make the return journey across the threshold to remain stuck in her original cultural space.   This can be understood through a very important conversation that takes place between Maiguru and Tambu.  Tambu discovers that Maiguru studied and received a Bachelor's degree when she was in England.   Maiguru makes the statement that "What it is to have to choose between self and security" ( Nervous Conditions 101).  Maiguru gets a glimpse of freedom when she crosses culture spaces.  However, because she is a woman she is still controlled by the patriarchy of her original culture and can not truly be her free self.  Instead she chooses the security of her own culture, security in the fact that she must always live under the rule of a man.  Thus she is not a true hybrid even though she has been changed.   In one part of the novel she embraces hybridity by leaving Babamukuru, but she comes back proving that cultural hybridity is a space in which Maiguru can not occupy. 

The second example of a cultural hybrid who can survive within a space of hybridity is Tambu.  She can understand the flaws of both cultures and is able to transverse between two different cultural spaces.  Eventually she embraces the idea of cultural hybridity when she decides to leave for the Sacred Heart mission.   She values education--something associated with the European colonizer--because she sees it as away to over come the patriarchy of her culture, a patriarchy in which women are demeaned and and controlled.   Tambu becomes a hybrid and uses it as weapon against both the Europeans and the controlling men of her society.  She says "something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began" (Nervous Conditions 204).   This "expansion" she describes is synonymous with the great migration because she understands the fact that her family as forever been changed.

The final person who is a cultural hybrid and asserts it every chance she gets is Nyasha.  However, Nyasha represents the destruction that faces the hybrids who are stuck between two cultural spaces unable to achieve full hybridity, rejected by both cultures.   This can best be understood by the fact that Nyasha has a complete break down and eventually suffers body issues, such as anorexia because of the taxation of dealing with two cultures that are constantly contesting her self-identity.    In her break down Nyasha declares "Why do they do it...to me and to you and to him? Do you see what they've done? They've deprived you of you, him of him, ourselves of each other....They've trapped us....I'm not one of them but I'm not one of you" (Nervous Conditions 200-203).    Thus Nyasha sees destruction in the concept of hybridity and the swapping of cultures.  She is forever doomed to be stuck in a space of cultural enunciation, unable to be one or shall we say the other.   She doesn't become the new cultural hybrid because she is unable to truly understand herself. 


As you can see cultural hybridity can effect the colonized in a variety of different ways.  Some it has little influence on, like the passive Maiguru.  Some it has a great influence on, like the extremely perceptive Tambu who can survive in the future through hybridity because of  a colonial past.  And sometimes hybridity can serve as a means of entrapment, like Nyasha who can never leave the space of cultural enunciation.   Overall hybridity suggests that once the "great migration" began, the world was changed for ever and East and West were constantly forced to view each other in terms of cultural enunciation and newness.   A cultural crisis entered the world through hybridity.