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?