End of Semester

My friend Matt put finals week very eloquently the other day:

Finals week is for everyone else -- for English majors, finals week is the week BEFORE finals when they turn in their final papers.
(For more on Matt, check out his Blesis -- Blog for my Thesis -- here)

So very true. So, in lieu of a real post, an excerpt from the paper I'm working on now, my second-to-last Post Colonial Lit paper.

In the great Literature family, we could say that Post-colonialism is something like the middle child, trying to stand up to the reputation of their older, more recognized sibling while at the same time trying to strike out on their own to form a new reputation altogether.[1] Trapped by accepted modes of transmission for stories, both in terms of language and form, Postcolonial authors still continue trying to tell stories that are relevant to them and counteract the last generation’s misinformation. This has been the case in all of the seven postcolonial novels we have read so far this semester, authors trying to tell stories that are relevant to themselves, their people and place, and their causes. Such is also the case in Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago, a 2007 novel about the lives of Egyptian immigrants and some of the Americans in their lives living and working in and around the city of Chicago. Throughout his novel, Aswany uses many of the same techniques the authors we read in class did to make a point about how we think we understand life and minority populations in the United States.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gives us a wonderful example not only of middle child trying to step beyond older child’s shadow, but middle child openly making fun of the whole concept of the western construction of novels. With his absurdly omnipotent Saleem, the young man narrating the story with a healthy helping of god-like panache who takes credit for everything that happens to anyone in the story, Rushdie suggests that one person is insufficient to knowing the whole story, and that many perspectives are needed both to relate the story and also provide connections between all of the characters. That Saleem should be responsible for all events, large and small, is almost laughable. Rushdie’s other lesson in this book is that, at the same time one person cannot know a whole story, a single character cannot be a story unto themselves, and many characters are needed to fully form a cohesive tale. Saleem makes himself into the embodiment of the country of India, just as older sibling’s novels once made other main characters into the embodiments of virtue or experience, held up for the world to see and compare to. Saleem cannot possibly be India, and the experiences of the west’s chosen main characters cannot possibly be everyone’s. Aswany uses both of these concepts to a certain extent in Chicago – realizing that one person cannot know the whole story, he distributes the experiences of the story between many people, providing the necessary perspectives to fully understand the events. And none of these characters are the stereotypes the western audience is accustomed to seeing in their literature – the women are not submissive and veiled (or at least, they do not seem so), the men are neither feminine no brutish, and their culture is not one that wants to blow America to smithereens. Aswany uses his diverse and different cast to show his readers that the story of ‘the immigrant experience’ cannot be shown by one voice alone, just as Rushdie shows India’s story cannot be told by one voice alone either.

---

[1] I am aware that the ‘older/ younger’ divide is a poor choice of words. Certainly the argument can be made (and proven) that non-western literature has been around for generations longer than western literature. However, the west refuses to see it that way, (the entire reason we have this divide in the first place) and so, for the purposes of this paper, the categories will remain as I have named them.

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.

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.

Conflict.

My paper on fanfiction vocabulary is COMPLETE! All ten pages in their fannish, appropriative glory are done.

...and then I found out this morning that someone is writing their PhD dissertation on slash, and I felt sad. But I'm not a doctoral candidate, and I had half a semester to come up with ten pages on something I only found four books on, so I think I'm in the clear here.

This news about the doctoral candidate reminds me of something else I'm working on right now -- our last unit in peace studies dealing with the topic of race. This evening I have to go over to SJU to watch a movie we started in class called "The Color Of Fear" in which eight men of varying ethnic backgrounds (two latinos, two blacks, two asians, and two whites) discuss their perceptions on race. When we stopped the movie last class, one of the black men (whose name escapes me at the moment) had just finished a rant, for lack of a better term, in response to several comments by the others on what it means to be American. In what I thought to be a brilliant peice of discourse for someone who was so angry, he outlined his displeasure in the idea that one has to "give up the hyphen" as it were to truly be American. He said that we can't all be the same, so why are we trying, and that being American is all about owning who you are, be it African American or Euro-American.

I won't hide the fact that by the time he was finished, I was crying. Reading my online blog will probably not have given you the sense that I am by nature a very emotional person, especially when it comes to problems I know I can't solve but want to anyway. My problem with this issue is this -- I have always felt either way I approach 'a minority issue' if we can call it that, if I connect with the issues presented to me I will be considered patronizing, and if I don't connect I will be considered racist. Either way, I lose.

This is not the first time Peace Studies has made me feel this way -- When we were reading "Beloved" earlier in the semester, I faced the same problem, addressed on this blog in "An All-Seeing Eye: The Big Other in The Bluest Eye". I had read Toni Morrison before and had run into the problem of not liking "Beloved." I had a hard time coming out and saying that because I could be seen as racist. On the other hand, I had a hard time coming out and saying that the power and emotion in "The Bluest Eye" struck me in ways that I have not been struck before because I might be seen as patronizing --

Pre-conditioned responses have already been embedded into my system, and apparently one of them is to step away any time a black author tries to involve me in the shared feeling of remorse and say "But I'm not on the same level as you."

This is troublesome indeed, and I'm not entirely sure I know how to solve that. On the one hand, it is true -- not being picked for the kickball team is by no means the same as being rejected from the social network of your classroom by your peers because you are black and do not look like the beauty ideal of Shirley Temple in any way, as Pecola is in The Bluest Eye.

I feel the same way about Toni Morrison's writing as I do about slash fanfiction. While I've been doing my research, I kept coming across information that told me that female fanfiction writers write slash to break away from the hetrosexual-centric culture and reclaim agency and writing space for themselves. It sounds epic and exciting and revolutionary...and I'm not part of it. I'm a female fanfiction writer. I've never written a piece of slash fanfic in my life. I'm part of the group of writers reaffirming the social norm in their writing. And for some reason, that makes me feel bad. Why can't I be part of the majority and enjoy it? It's not that I look down on the minority, that I consider their expieriences less valid and important than my own, it's that I like it where I am. I'm being guilt-tripped into thinking that just because I enjoy Jane Eyre, whose main character is allowed to exist and prosper because her colonial sister Bertha is repressed by the system of British Imperialism, I am a bad person.

Why?

And perhaps more importantly, what do I do now?

Outsourcing- the New Colonialism

Yesterday I went to see the movie "Outsourced" (See the official site) at the Gene Siskal Film Center in Chicago. If any of you reading this blog get a chance to go see it or see that it's playing in your area, GO. It is a funny, intelligent, well-thought out piece of filmmaking, an independent that looks and sounds like a mainstream romantic comedy with a liberal helping of a few college professors of economics thrown in.

The movie centers around Todd Hamilton, a thirtysomething working as a supervisor in the Wish Fulfillment (fancy term for order-taking) section for Western National Novelty Company, an Oriental Trading post type shindig that sells hokey kitsch (a word that makes an appearance in the film to much hilarity) to Americans across the country. Then Todd's told his job is being outsourced -- and that he has to go train the new call center people to get their MPI (minutes per incident, or amount of time taken talking to the customers) down to six minutes. It's a thankless job, one that involves getting to the small town where the call center is located, surviving some of the local cuisine, and trying to figure out the nuances of Indian culture. He makes friends, falls in love, and gradually learns to like India, a transformation that's shown rather brilliantly in the film by a baptism of sorts in a river and the ensuing changes in the way Todd dresses.

But what makes the film really resonate is the way Todd at the beginning of the movie has a hard time dealing with Indian culture. He wants his employees to sell their kitsch and move on. But there are cross cultural barriers that need to be fumbled over first, and Todd, at the beginning of the movie, doesn't understand that. He's another colonialist, part of the new colonialism -- the outsourcing movement. But the Indian people who are working with him understand that, and they tell him straight out that he needs to understand India if he wants to get this to work, a very post-colonial idea. One of the characters (the future love interest) stands in in a staff meeting after Todd has just told them they need to learn to speak English and tells him, flat out, "English is the first language of the government here in India. We got it from the British and so did you."

Todd does some other colonizing, too -- he sets up an incentive program to push the MPI down by using some of the products that the employees are selling, like a Packers cheesehead (which he has a hard time explaining the use of at a staff meeting) and a hot dog cooker. His boss calls him angrily after he's placed the order and asks him why he should ship these products half way around the world. Todd replies "Because I want to introduce them to a market of about a billion people." The boss then replies, cool as a cucumber, "I can have them there by Friday." Just like the British, Todd and Western National are conquering to open up new markets.

Bottom line, Outsourced was a great movie with a message for people who wanted to find it and a good story and some first-rate comedy for those who just want to sit and eat their popcorn. It's on my list of DVDs to purchase now.