A Birthday!

Today, dear friends, is the birthday of one of my all-time favorite poets, and the reason why I can safely say I love dusty old white man poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--So, Happy 202nd birthday, Henry! Now, my readers have a lot to thank this man for -- he contributed the rhyme scheme from The Skeleton in Armor to my Chronicles of Narnia poem The Star's Daughter, the title and driving inspiration for my first major fanfic, The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, the driving inspiration behind my ACHIEVE project, The Epic of Astrid, and above all other things, a longstanding love of narrative poetry.


I first met HWL here, at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. We went to have lunch there with my grandparent's neighbors, the Cammetts. I was about seven at the time and couldn't appreciate the book they gave me, a clothbound copy of The Tales of a Wayside Inn, a collection of narrative poems Longfellow wrote inspired by a summer he spent here in the 1860s. In it, a group of travelers (The Landlord, the Student, the Sicilian, the Spanish Jew, the Musician, the Theologian, and the Poet) meet around a fire and exchange stories. It's a wonderfully evocative collection, containing such classics as Paul Revere's Ride, that staple of the American History class, and it's been my friend through a lot of interesting adventures. Now in my slightly more appreciative age I want to go back and see the old place again, as I remember lunch being really good. There were also a lot of old millstones on the other side of the road and some wonderfully picturesque stone walls.

So, in commemoration of HWL's birthday, I want to share a snippet of one of my favorite poems with you - Emma and Eginhard, the poem responsible for The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose. This is one of many passages of his I can recite by heart; Hopefully those of you who know me will understand from this clipping why I like his work so much...

When Alcuin taught the sons of Charlemagne,
In the free schools of Aix, how kings should reign,
And with them taught the children of the poor
How subjects should be patient and endure,
He touched the lips of some, as best befit,
With honey from the hives of Holy Writ;
Others intoxicated with the wine
Of ancient history, sweet but less divine;
Some with the wholesome fruits of grammar fed;
Others with mysteries of the stars o'er-head,
That hang suspended in the vaulted sky
Like lamps in some fair palace vast and high.

In sooth, it was a pleasant sight to see
That Saxon monk, with hood and rosary,
With inkhorn at his belt, and pen and book,
And mingled lore and reverence in his look,
Or hear the cloister and the court repeat
The measured footfalls of his sandaled feet,
Or watch him with the pupils of his school,
Gentle of speech, but absolute of rule.

Among them, always earliest in his place.
Was Eginhard, a youth of Frankish race,
Whose face was bright with flashes that forerun
The splendors of a yet unrisen sun.
To him all things were possible, and seemed
Not what he had accomplished, but had dreamed,
And what were tasks to others were his play,
The pastime of an idle holiday...

Mister Shakespeare

For those of you who don't already know, one of the English Classes I'm taking this semester is Shakespeare. So far, we've plowed through Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and latest, Othello. Now I have to say, of the plays so far I'm two for four on enjoying reading them. (Measure for Measure, while an intense play with lots of great stuff to discuss about hypocrisy and the nature of power, didn't quite do it for me, and Troilus and Cressida ends poorly.)

So in the spirit of plays I actually enjoy, I watched the 1995 Fishburne/Branagh version of Othello (SO good!) and then played around a little with Wordle. (If you haven't tried it yet, stay away! It will eat your life.)

So, here's the full text of Othello:

Hamlet, because I felt like it and it turned out well...
And King Lear. We're reading that next! I'm not excited so much for the story but that I've read it once before, in high school. I remember disliking it then.

I think I enjoyed Othello for what some might consider a strange reason -- We started reading some of it in my Post Colonial Lit class, which gets more face-time on this blog than Shakespeare does, probably because it's po-co, and it wants to make me feel bad for letting my literary tradition disenfranchise it for so many years. Mea culpa. In one of the books we read for Po-Co, Season of Migration to the North, by Talib Salih, one of the main characters, Mustapha, references Othello after one of his lovers asks him where he's from in Africa, since he doesn't quite look Arab and he doesn't quite look African (He's Sudanese.) Here's an excerpt from my latest paper for Po-Co, addressing Salman Rushdie's phrase about the empire writing back --

“The Colonized world,” Frantz Fanon writes in his 1963 book The Wretched of the Earth, “is a world divided in two. The dividing line…is represented by barracks and police stations…” This division Fanon speaks of is also evident in our Empire model, divided into Imperial Center and Periphery. (We can also designate this as “Everything that belongs to the Empire but isn’t the home country.”)

However, if we introduce into this model a group of people who are neither Central or Peripheral, the binary is undermined and proven useless for the purpose it was designed for, to separate and legitimize Central power. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso SeaSeason of Migration to the North both give us characters who exist in this neither-nor group; Rhys’ Antoinette is born of European parentage but is culturally a black Islander, and Salih’s Narrator and Mustapha are born Sudanese but are educated in the European fashion. In the case of Antoinette, these differing identities drive her to insanity, forcing her into an identity that can be compatible with the Center-Periphery model as a crazy Islander, the ultimate expression for the Center of how backwards and Other the Periphery is.

Salih takes a somewhat different approach with Mustapha Sa’eed and his unnamed narrator. While Antoinette goes insane trying to satisfy both identities, Periphery and Center, Mustapha exploits the created identity assigned to the Periphery by exposing women to so much of it they realize how false it really is. Bringing the created Periphery into such close contact with the Center and exposing it as creation drives the Center into insanity, leading two women Mustapha seduced into killing themselves after they understand the truth. Salih’s Mustapha makes two comments about this collision, invoking Shakespeare’s tragic hero Othello to express himself. In the first, he says that “I am Othello – I am a lie” but in the second, later on in the book, he says “I am not Othello – Othello was a lie.” The first comment expresses Mustapha’s acceptance of the created Peripheral identity, and the denial of any true Native identity; the second, however, is his acknowledgment of the created nature of the Peripheral and his assertion that he has no obligation to be part of that creation.

Call to Arms

I WANT YOU

TO READ THIS BLOG

Sometimes my friend Michelle has a photo kick, and sometimes awesome pictures like this one happen. I'm wearing a newspaper bicorn and her Sergeant Pepper Coat, and I have to say, I look pretty spiffy.

Celebration!

Last weekend I posted my 40th fanfiction over at FF.net. As of this past October, I have been a member of that site for nearly five years, since the 8th grade, when I bravely ventured out from my floppy-disk bound writing endeavors into the big wide world of public critique.

Let's see how times have changed, shall we?

First off, I no longer save my stories on floppy disks. In fact, the computer on which I now save my stories no longer has a space for floppy disks. My first public story was a Lord of the Rings parody of Wierd Al's Phantom Menace, written with some help from my friend Katie on the way between her house and mine for an occasion that has gone beyond memory. My 40th story was a Kingdom of Heaven fic explaining a minor incident in my Song of a Peacebringer fic (I think we could start calling it a fanfiction novella at this point -- it's 114 pages long...)

My first contributions to FF.net were in the Lord of the Rings archive, centered on Boromir, my first real literary crush. My first large piece of work was The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, a Lord of the Rings story I affectionately called 'My Baby' for a long time because it was the longest thing I'd ever written. I wrote each chapter in a separate document, so it's difficult to say how many pages long it actually was, but FF.net puts the word count at around 53,821 words, including, of course, the Author's Notes that were regrettably common in those days. Song of a Peacebringer (which is being composed in a single document and parsed out into separate chapters) is, at the time of this blogging, some 55,178 words long. And it's not quite done, either.

Goodness, how times have changed -- I'm still verbose and still writing obscenely long fanfic.

Today my high school friend Catroux interviewed me for a paper she's writing on fanfiction and identity in teenagers -- hopefully, if she says yes, I'll post an edited (for continuity) copy of that interview up for you to read and learn a little bit about me and my journey as a fanfiction writer. And hopefully she'll post some of her paper, too...

Speaking of papers, I don't know if I ever told you all that my own paper on fanfiction (the one mentioned here, here, and here on this blog) is going to be presented by yours truely at Scholarship and Creativity day! Not everyone gets to do that, you know. You've got to special. Ground-breaking.

So, share around the balloons, have a slice of CAKE


-- and celebrate this milestone with me! What milestone, you ask?

The milestone of being thought important and authoritative enough to interview!

Foiled by the Hill AGAIN!

Okay, it's bad enough when you constantly check books out of the library like these:

(Yes, that last one really is the size of my head -- it's a little over 1000 pages and weighs about five pounds. I think I have a serious problem when the books I check out for kicks and giggles are bigger than the ones I check out for actual classwork.)

But it's really bad when you're looking for obscure books in the library catalog and not only does your library have them, but they're so obscure they're held at the RARE BOOK LIBRARY on your campus.

Yeah, that's right. I've been foiled by the Hill Manuscript Museum and Library on not one, but TWO books tonight. I wanted a copy of "Berengaria : in search of Richard the Lionheart's queen" and "A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea" (the Babcock translation) and both of them are at the Hill.

I know, I need a new hobby. Or a life. But I really don't care.

And I just found out this evening that Hildegarde of Bingen, my favorite 11th century mystic, told someone not to marry Princess Sybilla of Jerusalem. This makes me excited!

...Yes, I have a favorite 12th century mystic. Deal with it.

Colonialism at Work

...in P O'B's HMS Surprise. Mr. O'Brian starts his description (Maturin's description, actually) with some of the stock images we've come to expect when talking about the east, and then he veers off a little, talking instead about what the British have also brought to India, what some of the hands refer to earlier as 'the spicy coast'. (Recall Colonel Brandon's response to Margaret's inquiry about what India is like in Sense and Sensibility -- "The air is full of spices!")

"Bombay: Fresh fruit for his invalids, iced sherberts for all hands, enormous meals, the marvels of the East; marble palaces, no doubt; the Parsee's silent towers; the offices for the Commissioners of the former French Settlements, counters and factories on the Malabar coast; the Residence of Mr. Commissioner Canning." (P.189)

That is the expected -- in the next chapter we see the real.

"Fresh Fruit for the invalids, to be sure, and enormous meals for those who had time to eat them; but apart from the omnipresent smell and a little arrack that came aboard by stealth, the wonders of the East, the marble palaces, remained distant, half guessed objects for the Surprise." [bold my own] (p.190)

It's interesting (and telling) that P O'B uses the same phrase twice, the 'marvels of the East'; He, like so many others before him, is using Orientalist stock images, renting a crowd, as Achebe would say. And his last line, about how the crew of the Surprise will remain in the dark about what India really looks like, says a lot about how those stock images are transfered -- by ignorance and a lack of original data.


Quotes from O'Brian, Patrick. "HMS Surprise" Reprinted WW Norton and Co, New York, 1991.

'Cause We Are Living in a Colonial World

...and I am the product of a colonial system. *music notes*

Not the Madonna song you all know and love, is it? Hey, materialism has everything do with colonialism. Joseph Conrad's insistence on the prevalence of the ivory trade out of the Congo tells me so. ( I could use this post to rant about how much I hate Heart of Darkness, but I have other fish to fry.)

In my Post-Colonial Lit class we started out by reading several articles by people like Edward Said, theorists and authors who have made it their life's work to understand the relationship between 'The West' and 'The East' in thought, writing, and politics. Said posits that there's a mindset Europeans have called Orientalism that colors the way they see the Eastern world (ie, anything that's not Europe) and that this mindset is still prevalent in today's society, especially in our news and entertainment media.

Today's example comes to us courtesy of BBC's recent adaptation of the Robin Hood legend. As BBC dramas go, it's not their best, but it's entertaining and it kills time on weeknights when I'm supposed to be doing homework. I've got a lot of problems with it, though, and one of them is increasingly becoming the portrayal of non-Europeans on the show, mainly because all the non-European characters turn into stereotypes. My problem yesterday was that some of the characters were of African descent, and, while I have the highest respect for equal opportunity hiring practices, I contend that there were no people of African descent wandering around in England in the 12th century, slave or freeperson. However, today's problem was with their portrayal of Arabs. Since this is the 12th century, and Robin has just come back from the Crusades, I buy that they can (and should) show up in this story. However, the re-occuring Arabic character on the show, Djac (say: Jack -- I have no idea where this name came from, as it doesn’t quite sound right for the period or the character) is played by an Indian actress (a very fun, spunky actress -- I give her props) and this, I think shows just a little of what Said is talking about when he indicates that Europeans tend to group everyone into "Us" and "Not Us."

The episode I'm watching today includes the character al-Malik, Saladin's nephew and a real historical character. However, this man is portrayed as wearing eyeshadow, bright red robes, and speaking English without necessary articles like 'the' and 'a.' He eats food that the European characters don't, he's a little effeminate – these are all hallmarks of the classic stereotype of the Eastern male. (He also refers to himself as Saracen, something no Muslim or Arab would EVER do, as Saracen is a European designate.) Chinua Achebe, whose article “An Image of Africa” we had to read for next class, gives the reason for these negative portrayals thusly, a description that applies to Arabs as much as it applies to the African peoples Achebe is really talking about –

“For some reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa.”

By using Non-Europeans as the bearers of ‘bad’, ‘backwards’ characteristics, the European characters look much smarter and better than their “Eastern” counterparts.

Back to the show -- al-Malik is trying to broker peace between the English and the Muslims, and Saladin has sent assassins, (not THE Assassins, unfortunately) to kill him in order to stop this from happening, something I think the real Saladin would not have done as the real Saladin did, at one point, try to broker peace using al-Malik. (The plan was to marry his nephew to Richard's sister Johanna, but that fell through when they both refused to convert to the other's religion. Go figure.)

But wait, it gets better -- the assassins are all women. Women wearing turbans and green bodysuits, who undress in the presence of men and then do a cool slightly ninja-esque thing with their swords to totally own Robin Hood and his men. Now I know that modern Muslim women are a lot more enfranchised than their 12th century counterparts, and I know that there are several examples of women who held tremendous power in the Arab world in the 12th century (Thank you, Fatima Mernissi), but the bodysuits and the unveiling and the being assassins bit strikes me as a little odd. There's also a point where these women look to be doing something like tai-chi and using throwing stars, which, as all men of learning know, are both CHINESE. al-Malik is also going to present the peace delegation with something that looks suspiciously like an acupuncture dummy, another Chinese innovation.

My point is, whoever cast this show or wrote it was thinking as Said implies all Westerners think -- as Us and Them. There's no real distinction between the inventions and culture of the Chinese and the inventions and culture of the Arab world, two great cultural traditions that should be given their own due. They’re both not European, and that means they can be lumped together.

In the show’s defense, there are a few bright spots. When Much tells Djac she could escape slavery by renouncing her god and saying that she’s a Christian (the sale of Christian slaves is forbidden, but any non-Christians, apparently, are open game on the slave market), Djac tells him to try it first if it’s so easy. Much, after a lot of trepidation about the Hand of God coming down to smite him, realizes he can’t do it, and Djac, smirking, makes him come to terms with the fact that it’s no easier to denounce Allah than it is to denounce the Christian God. Robin, at one point, quotes the Qu’ran, calling it the “Saracen Bible” when the rest of the Merry Men ask if he’s quoting the Christian Bible instead. It’s a nice interfaith dialogue moment, even if it’s a mislabeled one. At the end of the episode, al-Malik and Robin have a chat about peace, and he is allowed to continue on home with a shell-shocked crusades veteran who is going to try some Arabic medicine to see if he can’t get better that way.

My Post Colonial Lit professor stressed at the beginning of the semester that the point of Post Colonial literature is something along the lines of making the world understand the validity of all experiences, colonized as well as colonizer, and that one of the first steps along this journey we’re taking this semester is evaluating how we read and perceive works of literature. Recognizing Orientalism is one step.

I think I’ve got that down, or at least, I hope so. Or is this entire post and my observations just another unenlightened westerner preaching about what the East is really like? I think I’ll need Professor Mitra’s opinion, just to be sure.