Making Autobiography and Racial-Self-Making

David Roediger opens his brilliant The Wages of Whiteness with a bit of autobiography: growing up in Cairo, at the point where the Ohio river meets the Mississippi, he was educated to a knowledge of racism and white supremacy that was hardly hindered by the fact that he, personally, didn’t actually know any black people. The implicit point (which becomes more explicit later on) is simple: white supremacy, as he experienced it, is not really about black people, it just uses them as its object, on its way towards something else.

His book is therefore in sharp disagreement with someone like Winthrop Jordan, for whom “race” is a given (and for whom there are very basic psychological reasons why white people feared, then hated, and then despised black people, a point Jordan illustrates in White over Black at great and intimidating length). In Jordan’s narrative, in other words, racism begins when different races met each other, “race” being an existing precondition, and a thing which (it is implied) will continue in some form as long as they are in contact. For Roediger, on the other hand, “white” and “black” are very much in quotation marks; what they mean is neither a given, nor are they terms that mean anything in a permanent sense: race is a thing which is always being practiced and made according to social necessities, and as these practices and necessities change with changing society, so too does “race” change, fundamentally. That, you see, is an empowering gesture: in contrast to the kind of fatalism implied by the “race is forever” argument of a Winthrop Jordan, Roediger’s conception of race as a formation, a construction, or a production allow for the possibility that it might be made in different ways, or even unmade altogether. The title of Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race makes this point explicitly, and takes direct aim at the weaknesses in Jordan’s book to argue, again, that race is thing that must be made. And as Roediger’s more recent work (Towards the Abolition of Whiteness) argues, it is also a thing which must be un-made.

As a sidenote, this intellectual debate is related to one of the ways that Edward Said (of the previous post) can be usefully critiqued. One problem with “Orientalism” as a framing paradigm is that it conflates the kinds of orientalizing gazes that Europe used to understand the other it was Crusading against in the middle ages with the radically different ways an explicitly imperial Europe understood its colonial others in places like India (and with, as a bonus, the ways that “The West” has taken in recent years to understanding “the Muslim world”). Said has a tendency to run all these things together, to produce (ironically) a timeless and unchanging “Orientalist,” a figure who who continually re-imagines and reproduces a timeless and unchanging “Oriental.”

The trouble is, though, there is a kind of continuity between the ways that wars with the Saracens were understood in medieval Christiandom and the style of contemporary doctrines of “preemptive war,” as Bush’s revealing lapses into “crusade” rhetoric occasionally indicate. By the same token, for all the limitations of Winthrop Jordan’s work (and some of the psychoanalysis seems particularly sketchy to me), it is also true that colonial-era attitudes towards African slaves and free-men are part of the same history that informs the ways Barack Obama can and cannot run for president. Roediger wouldn’t deny that, of course; his work as an engaged historian indicates precisely his belief in the past’s relevance to present struggles. And how to navigate historical continuity and historical change, at the same time, is one of the most difficult rhetorical and conceptual problems that a historian has to grapple with. I personally favor Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling”: as he observes in the dazzling opening to The Country and the City, the difference between rural and urban in medieval England was completely and totally different than it was in industrializing England, and neither has a nearly strong enough empirical corellation with how urban and rural are integrated today. These terms, “urban” and “rural,” simply mean different things. And yet, he notes, the fact that we continue to use the same words even as we reinvent them indicates that our feelings about urban and rural have a certain continuity of structure, a fact which gives the social scientist something to grip on to as everything else changes.

I tend to be quite skeptical of the autobiographical gesture. W.E.B. DuBois, the patron saint of The Wages of Whiteness (and this blog, sort of) once claimed that “autobiographies have had little lure; repeatedly they assume too much or too little: too much in dreaming that one’s own life has greatly influenced the world; too little in the reticences, repressions, and distortions which come because men do not dare to be perfectly frank” and my dissertation will make a certain amount of hay out of the fact that he wrote five or so autobiographies. But in moments like this, DuBois was his own best critic, and he always cast a critical eye on the ways that “autobiography” could function as a technology of the self, to use a terminology not his own; likewise, the autobiographical gesture in The Wages of Whiteness also functions as a way of asserting a kind of control over history and personal history, a kind of place to stand from which the world can be moved. As Roediger explains it,

“Until very recently, I would have skipped all this autobiographical material, sure that my ideas on race and the white working class grew out of conscious reflection based on historical research. But much of that reflection led back to what my early years might have taught me: the role of race in defining how white workers look not only at Blacks but at themselves; the pervasiveness of race; the complex mixture of hate, sadness and longing in the racist thought of white workers; the relationship between race and ethnicity.”

This claim seems to me at least very optimistic, and perhaps somewhat of a delusion: the idea that one can transcend one’s history by looking back over it, by transforming the formative experiences of one’s life into “teachings” that can be discarded or retained, depending. I guess it’s just that I’m a believer in the nature/nurture debate: we are what we are, and whether that being is more determined by the stuff we were born with or by the experience we have been blessed to receive, there is no self that can make itself without reference to that formative experience. This is far from an argument for fatalistic acceptance of the status quo, of course; as Roediger puts it, “the complex mixture of hate, sadness and longing” is a volatile mixture, offering many choices and possibilities. As historians put it, beware monocausal outcomes, and this is just as true with personal histories: the overdetermination of the self means that we’re not so much determined by some singular identity as we are racked by conflicts between the many different and contradictory parts of ourselves that make us up.

So maybe there’s nothing necessarily so wrong with an optimistic delusion or two, and maybe it’s okay to occasionally assert, against all the available evidence, that “Yes we can.” And the gesture of Roediger’s authorial position, the claim that he could grow up amidst a culture of white supremacy and race hatred, and yet transcend that origin, to claim that we make race instead of being made by it, that we make ourselves instead of the reverse, well, I find such a claim as logically unconvincing as I find it emotionally necessary.

Edward Said as Masonry

Chapati Mystery noted, recently, how Edward Said’s death seemes to have ushered in a broad and sweeping effort to to obliterate his legacy. This silly review is an excellent example, written by a guy who wrote a book attacking Said (For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies) reviewing other people’s books attacking Said: Daniel Martin Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid and Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Here’s enough rope for Irwin to hang himself:

“So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978 ) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”. It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything.”

To put it more succinctly: academics wish the arguments in Orientalism were true because if they were, these deluded academics can pretend to be political activists. And, so fervently do they wish this that they will ignore real scholarship that contraverts the Saidian thesis, scholarship such as that by this troika of mute, inglorious Miltons toiling in obscurity and in the Times Literary Review.

As Irwin demponstrates, Varisco sets out “to expose Said’s rhetorical tricks” and to critique his “use of pejorative vocabulary,” while Ibn Warraq notes Said’s damning failure to speak as many languages, or as well, as the Orientalist scholars he criticized. Leftist scholars, of course, will ignore these valiant efforts and continue to walk about with their heads in the sand (an impossible thing physically to do, I know, but such is the willful blindness of the left!). They will refuse to see, for example, that because Said uses the pejorative word “ransack” instead of “read,” “consulted,” or “examined,” it necessarily and oh-so-logically follows that all Orientalist scholars were politically neutral and unbiased scholars. Not only this, leftist scholars will fail to realize that because “Said was utterly oblivious to the humour and stylishness of Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen,” it naturally follows that, um,it’s completely obvious that, well… Actually, I don’t have a clue why this is supposed to be relevent. Here’s the passage:

“Said was utterly oblivious to the humour and stylishness of Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen. Kinglake had enough money to travel to amuse himself. But Said’s Orientalists are a classless lot. That is silly. It is impossible to browse through the early proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society or the Société Asiatique without recognizing that nineteenth-century Orientalism was presided over by aristocrats and that for the most part the research was done by men with private incomes.”

The point this is in service of utterly escapes me. I’m open to the suggestion that Said missed something important because he used the dichotomy of West and East in ways that obscured rich and poor; frankly, I’m so open to it that I almost presume it to be true anyway, since this is an ongoing problem in “postcolonial” theoretical circles more generally. But Irwin doesn’t seem to have any sense of what Said is supposed to have missed here. Why the fuck do we care that he was utterly oblivious to “the humor and stylishness of Eothen”? It doesn’t seem self-evident to me that such a thing has any bearing on what it means to be an “Orientalist,” but Irwin declines to pick up that burden of proof. Instead, and this is typical of the entire piece, he just blasts him for having made a mistake and then draws large and sweeping conclusions from that mistake: because Said fails to recognize the stylishness of a writer no one cares about anymore, not only is his entire work bunk, but the opposite of what Said argued must now be accepted as true. I trust the logical fallacy of all this is apparent.

I think Said makes a good target, actually, because his work does indeed have a lot of problems. He could be sloppy, and because he did have a tendency to take a strong case too far in service of a particular political agenda, a book like Orientalism hasn’t aged as well as it might have. There is a great deal to pick on in that book published thirty years ago. But none of it matters, at all. People still read Said, but it’s not like they need to, not like Said is some kind of load-bearing wall without which the entire edifice collapses. The practices that Irwin tries to lay at Said’s doorstep—reading novels to discover hidden colonialist subtexts, a hypercritical version of Western achievements, and thinking of research and teaching as political activities—are not exactly inventions of this evil conniving Palestinian worm Irwin imagines as lurking in Columbia’s woodpile. I mean, for seriously, does he really think Said invented the idea of teaching as a political activity? Does he really think that Said was the first person in the world to be critical of the West? Does he really think that British novels written during the apex of British colonial expansion weren’t at least partially about colonialism?

Said could have said any goddamn silly thing and it wouldn’t have meant that any of these conclusions were right or wrong. Said, you see, isn’t a load-bearing wall; he’s more like a piece of brick and plaster that was saved when the original house was renovated. He’s not the best piece of masonry there is; he lets in some water when it rains, and the newer building materials are able to hold in heat in the winter (and let it out in the summertime) much better than technology allowed in 1978. But there’s both a certain sentimental and historical attachment to him that keeps him around. He laid the original pattern according to which the structure has grown, and that means he’s still important in understanding how “postcolonialism” as a discourse works. And sometimes his failings have been a limitation. Much of what he has to say about the West’s attitudes towards the “Orient,” for example, is simply not applicable to the texts I study, books about Africa by both Westerners and Africans, and the ways that the enterprise of “postcolonialism” often tries to stick us all under one roof does create problems (as does the broad “West” and “rest” dichotomies his work tends to suggest). But Said is still relevant not because everything he said was right but because he noticed a few very true things and tried to draw conclusions from them. One of these very true things is: that the ways in which Western scholarship produced knowledge about the “East” has tended to be self serving and imperialist, a fact which literary scholarship generally prefers not to think about. This remains true as a tendency; pointing out the ways that Said’s particular hypothesis doesn’t adequately account for this data doesn’t make the data disappear (as Irwin and ilk would like), it simply demands that we work better to produce better hypothoses, something wholly in the spirit of Said’s own work. Though Irwin would prefer not to admit it, Said was quite capable of critiquing people on both sides of the West/Rest dichotomy: he fought for Palestinian sovereignty while strongly criticizing Arafat and the PLO, and his brand of secular aesthetics was both (via its Auerbachian genealogy) implicitly quite “Western” and explicitly incompatible with most varieties of religious fundamentalism.

So Irwin is probably right that damning critiques of Said’s own work will not significantly hinder politically minded critics of a certain ideological strip from doing what it is that they do. This will occur to the extent that they are less blinded by their ideology than Irwin, an extent which, I will venture, is considerable.

“These Days”: conservative democrats then and now

From David Roediger’s 1991 Wages of Whiteness:

“When US elections are won or lost these days, the voting patterns of the ‘white worker’ receive considerable attention. In popular usage, the very term worker often presumes whiteness (and maleness), as in conservative Democrats’ call for abandoning ’special interests’ and returning the party to policies appealing to the ‘average worker’ — a line of argument that blissfully ignores the fact that the ‘average worker’ is increasingly Black, Latino, Asian and/or female. Most fascinating are sociologist David Halle’s recent observations on the self-identification of white workers. Halle writes that the New Jersey chemical workers he has studied prefer to call themselvese ‘working men’ (and ‘lower middle class’ or ‘middle class’ when describing their consumption patterns). The phrase working class speaks at once, Halle observes, of a class identity and of a gender identity. But its actual usage also suggests a racial identity, and identification of whiteness and work so strong that it need not even be spoken. That is, the white chemical workers do not describe as ‘working men’ Blacks who do similar jobs and who are more likely to be AFL-CIO members than are the white chemical workers’ neighbors. That category is instead seen as ‘naturally’ white, and Black workers become ‘intruders’ who are strongly suspected of being ‘loafers’ as well.”

From Hillary Clinton, circa a couple days ago:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Plus ca fucking change.

Which Book? Which America?: John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (with bonus Michelle Obama reference)

Sergeant Rutledge, from 1960, is probably not a great movie; it’s marred by weak acting and (according to in interview with the screenwriter) a sort of lazy directing and writing performance from Ford, who was getting quite on in years. One of the male leads-Sergeant Rutledge, a black cavalry officer wrongly accused of rape-was played by Woody Strode (who you’ve never heard of) even though the studio wanted to cast Belafonte or Poitier. I wish they had; Ford wanted the ex-football player because he looks magnificent, and he does, but the man is a passable actor at best and there are some cringeworthy moments of dramatic dialogue as a result. It says something about how Ford worked, though: he wrote in pictures and images, and the kind of image Strode could give off, the cut of his jaw and the rippling muscles, does come off as singularly impressive. Strode was always grateful for being rendered magnificent on screen in this way; as he put it: “You never saw a Negro come off a mountain like John Wayne. I had the greatest Glory Hallelujah ride across the Pecos river that any black man ever had on screen before.”

The whole movie is singular, actually. I’d never heard of it before, and I think that has something to do with the long shadow cast by To Kill a Mockingbird, which came later but which is also somewhat less daring. Both films are courtroom dramas, in which a black man is accused of a crime and defended by a brave white man who realizes that the honor of America is at stake in whether a fair trial can be held. In this film, Sergeant Rutledge is accused of the rape/murder of a white woman, and he runs, not because he’s guilty, but because, as he tells another black cavalry soldier, “white woman business” is something none of “us” can fight.

I give Ford a lot of credit for lines like this. There are two narratives in the film, actually-which is itself very Fordian-and they’re not wholly in alignment. The first is the To Kill a Mockingbird narrative, in which the trial is not primarily about the defendant, but about what he represents: the honor of America as adjudicated by its ability to treat an “other” with justice. There’s a scene in which the JAG lawyer argues with his love interest over whether this is “a good land” or not, whether it is now and whether it ever will be, and it sounds like classic “The-West-will-become-modern” talk, like Earp talking to his dead brother’s grave in My Darling Clementine. But here it’s clearly a question of whether or not an innocent black man accused of miscgination could ever get a fair trial. And it’s not an easy belief: the JAG office quotes Rutledge himself in saying that “this is a good land,” but Rutledge’s choice to run rather than face military justice indicates that his faith may be only in future possibility. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, then, the courtroom drama is therefore a test of whether America’s various idealisms have any purchase on reality, the test of whether this is really a good land or not. As the lawyer puts it, “If the color of a man’s skin is to be entered as evidence against him, or even as argument, then I say that it is this court that is on trial and not Sergeant Rutledge.”

These are strong words, I think, because the court’s acquittal is neither predetermined nor without costs. For one thing, the Capra-esque courtroom scene is more of an anamaly than anything else: Rutledge happens to be proven innocent, but Ford makes it quite clear that this was pretty lucky on his part and it could easily have gone the other way. America got lucky this time, but it quite clearly doesn’t, most of the time. And there’s a wonderful moment when the president of the court commends his officers for not having mentioned the fact of the color of the man’s skin, and the quick chiming in of his flunkies “Very well put, Mr. president!” is a lovely Fordian touch: not mentioning the fact of racial difference only enables white privilege to operate all the more effectively. There is no grounds for optimism in such a courtroom.

My favorite touch, though, is the question of what kind of “book” can represent justice in America. The JAG’s love interest, at one point, calls him a “cheap, contemptible, tin-plated book soldier” for insisting on bringing Rutledge back to stand trial. She doesn’t know what he knows-that the key piece of evidence clearing Rutledge has fallen into his hands-so the film asks but saves itself from having to answer the truly damning question: should he bring an innocent man back to stand trial in a courtroom he knows is rigged against him? As the JAG lawyer puts it, “a soldier can’t think by his heart; he’s got to think by the book,” but does this mean he has to adhere to the letter of the law when that letter is unjust? And the film makes it clear that the court is rigged; the actualy manual for courtroom procedure (the very book they’re using) is at one point revealed to be a confederate manual, which the US cavalry has adopted complete, to the judge’s embarrassment.

What I like best about the film, therefore, is this darkness, this hopeful optimism that America can overcome its history linked with a dogged refusal to forget how viciously present that history still is, in this case, that a black man can get justice in a courtroom still run according to the rules of proceedure set down by the confederacy (even if the judge and his cronies prefer to pretend that it isn’t). This, to me, is something much braver than the pablum optimism of To Kill a Mockingbird, where the end is predetermined, something much more like Michelle Obama’s statement that she had never been proud of America until the moment that it showed a willingness to elect a black man president. This land has to earn the right to feel good about itself, goddammit, and if it wants to do that, it’s got a long way to go. The film knows this, and shows it, to its credit.

There is, however, another book in the film, and here we tend towards a more questionable piece of Americana: using racism to overcome racism. At a crucial point in the film, Sergeant Rutledge is in handcuffs when Indians attack, and when he points out that the cavalry rules for engagement state that prisoners are to be freed and given weapons in the event of attack. He is freed, and armed (”like,” as he puts it, “the books says”), and is therefore able to lead his men in glorious victory over the savages, going far above and beyond the call of duty. Unlike the black and white justice of the confederate courtroom manual, in other words, the cavalry manual gives justice in white and red, and when there are injuns around, even a black man becomes American. And here, Rutledge suddenly regains his faith in America: at a key moment, he has a chance to ride away to the north, where he can be free (crossing a river, no less) but, of course, he decides to turn back and come to the aid of his fellow cavalry soldiers.

This is a mixed triumph: on the one hand, Rutledge can-when set alongside savage indians-become fully a member of the cavalry unit again, fully an American. One kind of racism can cancel out another. But even this mixed blessing must be fully qualified: like an uncle Tom, he can only prove his virtue through selfless service to white people. When questioned about why he didn’t just run away when he had the chance, he burst out “The ninth cavalry was my home, my freedom. If I deserted, I wasn’t nothing but a swamp rat nigger, and I ain’t that. Do you hear me? I’m a man.” The fact that he can only be a man by disclaiming the right to run away (and the “swamp rat” line is a clear reference to runaway slaves hiding in swamps) is important, as is the fact that this film does not, as such, attack the principle that miscegination is a lynchworthy offense. To the contrary, in an early scene, it goes to great lengths to establish that Rutledge knew his place and was (like Uncle Tom with Little Eva) a protector of white innocence and virtue. His one on-screen interaction with the girl he was supposed to have raped involves both the extension of his protective mantle (he sternly admonishes that “You’ll break your neck if you ride like that”) and a wink to the other white man in the scene. Coming hard on the clucking disapproval of the old lady who finds the sight of a young girl not riding side-saddle (clearly indicating that a spread-leg riding position is inappropriate for a girl of her maturity), Rutledge gives a similar warning: ride like that, and something bad will happen. And the wink is a gesture of mutuality, the assumption that he and all other men are united by the need to protect (and control) such sexualityan attempt to use manly fraternity to create interracial solidarity. He is wrong, of course; as it turns out, the other man was the guy who eventually rapes and murders the girl, but the important thing is that Rutledge himself is trying to use gender to overcome race*.

As with Uncle Tom, though, such manhood can only be accomplished by giving up the claim that, for example, a black man denied justice might have some grounds for complaint, can only be asserted by first accepting his proper place (a young girl’s protector). Unlike the Jeremiad rhetoric of, say, Frederick Douglass’ “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” Rutledge can only become American, can only earn his citizenship, by first accepting that it is his responsibility to earn it. For a black man to become an American, we are reminded, he has first to acknowledge that he is not an American, and only then can he begin to bargain for naturalization.

* This, by the way, is a muted version of a larger theme in Ford, maybe something I’ll post about the next time I feel a John Ford post in me. In The Searchers, the question of who is the real threat to female innocence (the savage rapist or the murderous John Wayne, who seeks to revenge the rape by killing the girl) is not really the issue: more important is Ford’s illustration that male possession of female virtue is, at the very least, a kind of latent violence, and often enough, a very real violation. Ford has taken flak from people who point out how many times you see a Ford hero violently taking possession of his woman (without even trying, Donovan’s Reef, The Quiet Man, and Drums Across the Mohawk all spring to mind) but such moments are visible as such precisely because Ford wants them to be, and plays them as such in ways you can;t help but notice and be disturbed by. What makes Ford remarkable, in other words, is that he’s so often willing to directly portray the ugly violence of gender as ugly and violent, without pretending that you can simply-by condemning it-get rid of it. And there’s some of that bravery in Sergeant Rutledge with regard to race; Ford constantly goes back to the confederacy over the course of his career because it represents a formative history within the United States’ consciousness, and while one could simply condemn it (and he pretty much does), that doesn’t really make it go away. So in movies like The Prisoner of Shark Island, I think Ford is, whether successful or not, trying to imagine a constructive engagement with that history, trying to imagine how something inescapably negative can be integrated into an America one would want to live in. The same with gender: he recognizes that marriage is bound up with all sorts of patriarchal privilege and violent possessiveness, but he uses his engagements with this violence to think about ways to make that violence into something positive. Again, I don’t wish to say that he succeeds, but there’s something much more interesting about his willingness to engage with the really hard questions, rather than simply wishing them away by moral righteous my-eye-hath-offended-me-ism.

Much of this is wrong, but that’s okay because everyone is wrong

When Americans are characterized as “clinging” to religion because of economic conditions, a presidential candidate shows an uncomfortably patronizing view of people’s agency under economic oppression. Marxists who try to talk about the relationship between economy and cultural superstructure are called (and call each other) vulgar for oversimplifying how culture and economics interact. When Thomas Frank suggests that Kansans are turning against their own self-interest by voting Republican, it is aptly observed that leftists vote against their own self-interest all the time.

Yet.

When liberals observe a correlation between religious fanaticism and anti-Americanism, they show themselves unable to understand what it is that religion actually does, essentially acceding to the spurious argument that Islam = Terrorism. When Marxists and liberal modernizers alike look at Africans as people that just want to be like Americans, and only need the start-up capital to do it, they show themselves to be as ethnocentric as all get out, as well as having internalized a vicious neo-liberal mentality in which become western is the same thing as becoming “free.”

And yet.

A lot of Africans do want to be Americans, and who the fuck can blame them? My USA passport is a valuable thing to have. And isn’t the whole problem that people in the rust belt don’t have agency? How does talking about their power to choose undo the lack of choice their world gives them?

Perhaps this is going to be more difficult than I thought.

Trading in Poverty; or, why I have a pavlovian response every time I see a front page story on “Africa”

“Doctor finds higher calling when death knocks” from Sunday’s San Francisco Comical:

Frank Artress nearly dies while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, and gains a sense of perspective, which moves him and his wife to “become bush doctors, dedicated to easing the heartbreak of Africa.” The key, however, is that their lives have changed; now they are giving back. So they become bush doctors. In Arusha, Tanzania. This is the place I lived when I started this blog, so it’s a place I know something about. And I don’t wish to make fun of these people, since I’ve done my time volunteering there, and they probably are very real and gunuine people. But I do wish to make fun of the newspaper that took their story and made it stupid.

Here’s a description of their new life:

Their new African home was a tiny apartment on one of the noisiest streets in Arusha - with a Maasai market selling chickens, goats and cows, a boisterous nightclub, and a mosque with predawn calls to prayer. Their electricity was intermittent, their tap water brown and they had no radio or television. They learned to appreciate cold showers and goat meat.

OK, “their new African home”? Putting aside the stupid way everything that happens in Africa seems to deserve the adjective of the continent, this paragraph is so confused about the kind of life one can and cannot live in a place like Arusha that’s it’s almost totally incoherent. First of all, one can live in first world comfort in Arusha if you want–none of this “brown tap water” and goat meat crap–and you’d still be paying much, much less than you’d pay for a rathole in San Francisco. There are lots of tourists and expats in town, and you can eat excellent Western food (or Italian, or Chinese, or Ethiopian) every day of the week and still pay a lot less than it would cost to live on Spaghetti in SF. If you don’t like goat, eat the chickens and cows that the Maasai are apparently selling on their doorstep. And even if the electricity is intermittent (something I doubt, if they’re as central as the description says they are), then there’s no reason why they couldn’t have radio and television. Both things exist and are widely available there. Same with running hot water.

The point is, if they want to appreciate deprivation, then they’re doing so by choice. Just as they went to climb Kilimanjaro as a kind of grander version of camping, these are people who are on a kind of deprivation tourism, living without all the first world conveniences because they’ve decided to try that out and see how it works. And bully for them for doing it; I did it, Thoreau did it, and lots of people do it, because its a good experience for bourgeois swine like us to have, on a variety of levels.

But the SFC wants to re-imagine it as a kind of spiritual quest, the hardship endured by people who have realized a higher calling and are “healing Tanzania.” No. People who go to “Africa” invariably get much, much more out of it than they deserve, or paid for. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s a self-serving illusion to think that the “white man in Africa” is doing anything but benefiting from that journey.

Some quotes from a companion piece, written by Meredith May trying to soak up some of the radiance from her Dr. Livingstone:

What Africa gave us in return is perspective. On our bouncy travels over dusty, pitted dirt roads, we saw so many Africans walking with the heavy burdens of poverty: emaciated men pulling oxcarts, women balancing buckets of water or bundles of charcoal on their heads, children with distended bellies herding cattle. All walking, every day, for hours, in the constant heat, on errands of survival. The next day, they would do it all over again. What did we have to complain about?

Yet the beauty of Africa is in how the people survive. I watched a bushman use bellows made of goat bladders to stoke a fire and melt scrap metal he collected from the side of the road. He poured the molten metal into the ground and buried it, pulled it back out and formed it into the two bracelets I now wear on my left wrist.

The ways that African deprivation becomes a commodity to be purchased and worn, well, that almost speaks for itself. As should the ways that Tanzanians (itself a highly differentiated identity) become figures for a continent, the ways that all people in Africa are simply Africans. Errands of survival, indeed; do homeless people on Shattuck avenue go on “errands of survival”? People have a tendency to try to survive, no matter where they are, and there’s nothing particularly noble or romantic about that. But it’s this Freudian sentence that sticks in my craw: “What Africa gave us in return is perspective.”

In return for what? What did this reporter give in exchange for her journey? What was traded to acquire that perspective? If it was money, then she got what she paid for. She got a perspective on the continent that tourists and the vicarious tourists of the newspaper reading population pay to receive. And she got a bargain, too. But Westerners have been pretending that there’s something noble about looking at poverty for a very long time, a self-serving fantasy that “bearing witness” to other people’s suffering, even sharing (selectively) in it, is something noble, and somehow benefits the people whose suffering is being exploited. The fact that she actually uses the words “in return,” without having done a thing herself, indicates how deeply rooted this fantasy of Western benevolence is.

To that point, let me merely append this bit of dialog from Sullivan’s Travels (which I got from Edge of the American West, who, patriotic Americans that they are, also like to post pictures of their local newspaper) a 1941 movie about a director dressing up as a tramp in order to experience how the other half lives. As he admires his newly ragamuffin appearance, he happens to ask his butler, Burrows, what he thinks:

Burrows: I don’t like it at all, sir. Fancy dress, I take it?
John L. Sullivan: What’s the matter with it?
Burrows: I have never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy, sir.
John L. Sullivan: Who’s caricaturing? I’m going out on the road to find out what it’s like to be poor and needy and then I’m going to make a picture about it.
Burrows: If you’ll permit me to say so, sir, the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous. You see, sir, rich people and theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches, as disease might be called the lack of health, but it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with Filth, Criminality, Vice and Despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.
Sullivan: Well, you seem to have made quite a study of it.
Burrows: Quite unwillingly, sir.

It’s open to debate whether Preston Sturges’ film is an attack on artists of the thirties who sought to use art as a political tool, people like Capra, or John Steinbeck traveling and living with the Okies as a prelude to writing about them. Michael Rogin has an interesting article (”What’s the Matter with Capra?”) on that. And as for bearing witness as a social crusade in general, I’m skeptical but basically agnostic. So I’m not going to say that the good doctor Artress is a anything but a good person trying to do good. Most Western development projects do more harm than good, by a wide margin. But while the road to hell may be paved with good intentions, good intentions can also lead you to good places too, so more power to them for doing what they can. But never admire someone for experiencing deprivation when they get paid for it, or admired for it. And this desire to pay and admire such modern day Doctors Livingstone for living the dream, to make them into bwanas against a backdrop of African ciphers for poverty and suffering, well… Such reporters get what they pay for too. And they get a bargain.

 

Bayart: African Doorways into American History

From Jean-Francois Bayart’s Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization:

“…historical memory is a complex and fallacious process whose emotional power is at least partially disconnected from the tangibility of facts. Without going as far as the grotesque consecration of Michael Jackson in the Akan village of Krinjabo in the Ivory coast (his unconscious had suggested that his ancestors came from here), the pilgrimages made to the island of Goree by Afro-Americans with a hankering after ‘roots’ demonstrate it in an exaggerated way. It is not even certain that the famous House of Slaves ever was such a place, and it is certain that the majority of captives whose descendants people the United States did not come from Senegambia. Nonetheless, even if one needs to put a spin on the facts, it is easier and less dangerous to meet one’s past a few cables’ length away from Dakar than in the delta of the Niger, in Fernando Po or Sao Tome. The need felt by Bill and Hillary (or by George W. and Laura) to have themselves photographed in the doorframe of the mythical door, which the ancestors of their electors supposedly crossed, confirms that it is not actually just a matter of cultural and family tourism, nor of any sorrowful or nostalgic contemplation of history, but rather of the self-expression of contemporary power. In any case, one result of the Civil War, and the massive European immigration and the social phenomenon of racism that ensued, is that the memory of slavery in the United States assumed a political importance out of all proportion to the slave labor that was really transported there and to the effective conditions of its existence, if we take as our measure the slave societies of the Caribbean or Brazil.”

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with completely eliding the difference between George W. Bush and African-American “heritage tourists,” but then that’s more a corellary of the point he’s tryin to make. In any case, what I find valuable about such an exercise is the way that emphasizing the a-historical logic of this kind of tourist imaginary makes it easier to place the work it does in the context of larger political narratives. And the strange self-serving ritual of a white US president’s pilgrimage to Goree speaks volumes.

Some Uneducated Speculations on “The African Novel” in Tanzania

When I was still Tanzania, I greedily purchased the few African novels that were available for purchase. This meant frequenting bookstores that sold novels to two very distinct markets: novels for white people and novels for Tanzanian students. I feel safe in saying that the comparatively high level printing, binding, and prices of the former pretty much limited those books to tourist and expatriate buyers (or were certainly printed with that market in mind), while the very specific pedagogical function of the latter confined their relevance to a similarly particular sub-section of the Tanzanian population: young people still in school. In the first category, you had both canonical English literature–penguin editions of D.H. Lawrence and so forth–and literary supplements to the tourist industry, stuff like this with books like Out of Africa and Green Hills of Africa straddling the gap. The second market was for novels used as textbooks, a mixed bag which I’ll look at in a moment. I was therefore an eccentric purchaser, poorly served by either marketing strategy: I was in search of an object, “the African novel,” which hardly exists as such in the local commercial consciousness.

When I asked for a good riwaya, on the other hand, older shopkeepers would often direct me, without discriminating, towards both canonical works of Swahili literature (especially pious stuff like Shabaan Robert) and towards older popular Swahili writing like Dar es Salaam Usiku (Dar es Salaam At Night, a sensationalist crime novel from the eighties). Younger booksellers would either peg me as a tourist (directing me towards Dineson or Hemingway), or, if my Swahili was good that day, would have no particular interest in me at all. The disconnect between older booksellers and younger ones could be quite profound, and I would speculate that it had something to do with the disconnect between Tanzania’s socialist past and its neoliberal present; when I looked for books by Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s independence-era socialist president, younger booksellers would let me know that none were for sale, while some of the older book sellers not only canvassed their acquaintances to find used copies for me (taking great and unsolicited pains to repair the books’ worn bindings with cellotape) but, on several occasions, refused even to take money for Mwalimu (”Teacher”) Nyerere’s books at all.

Most of the African novels in English I was able to buy, however, were on the shelves because they were (or had been) on the national education curriculum. And just as “the African novel” that is construed and taught in the West includes neither Dar es Salaam Usiku, Shabaan Robert, nor Julius Nyerere, so too does “the African novel” that is taught in Tanzanian secondary schools also categorically exclude such books. Swahili classes might use them (and that’s why they were there to be bought), but pupils would only read such Tanzanian writers in a class meant to improve their facility with literary Swahili; in their English classes, in contrast, the African novel would be taught, novels written in English from across the continent.

The ways that an English/Swahili curricular split implicitly separates the Tanzanian writers from the “African” writers is suggestive, but I draw the distinction only because it’s already drawn in the curriculum: ever since the education ministry began requiring that all secondary school classes (except Swahili class) be taught in English, Swahili writing gets parochialized at the same time that the global utility of English is being increasingly emphasized. Tanzania is one of the few African nations where virtually all business is conducted in an indigenous African language while English is not widely used. So the rationale behind the shift was partly that Tanzanians need to be better trained to face global competition, and partly the coldly pragmatic fact that there aren’t even close to being enough schools to meet the numbers of young Tanzanians that need to be educated (requiring them to do high school work in English weeds enough of them out of the system that the class sizes are simply enormous, rather than catastrophic).

All this is background to some fairly reckless speculations I want to make. First, it it seems reasonable to suggest that “the African novel,” as it’s experienced in Tanzania, is a function of pedagogy in a more specific way that I was arguing before: after purchasing all the African novels I could get my hands on, I found myself inadvertently completing a version of the high school English curriculum. And since it was a function of the books taught in English classes, this canon of “African novels” specifically excludes the canon of Tanzanian novels for having been written in Swahili, creating an interesting kind of distinction between “African” and “Tanzanian.” I wouldn’t want to speculate on whether, or how, this kind of distinction is actually perceived, or practiced, but it does seem significant that while there’s a reasonably broad tradition of Tanzanian critical writing on Swahili literature, the critical literature on Anglophone African writers is so dominated by the West that the canon of African writers considered worth reading in Tanzania look quite familiar to anyone who has ever taken a course in African literature at a Western university.

I hesitate to chalk that up to critical readers independently reproducing the same judgments of quality in both locations, but I’ll elaborate more on that in my next post. And, anyway, there were some surprises. For one thing, the curriculum seemed to be all men (though I was surprised to see a Swahili translation of Mariama Ba’s Une Si Longue Lettre for sale). But more than that, beyond the usual suspects (Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (1966), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958 ) and A Man of the People (1966), and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child (1964)), I was struck by two odd additions: Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946) and Ferdinand Oyono’s La Vie de Boy (1956, translated as Boy! ). They’re odd because you can see quite clearly why each of the other texts are there: for the three East African nations, you’ve got Okot P’Bitek for Uganda and Ngugi for Kenya (with Tanzania’s third slot across the hall in the Swahili class), for the novel by a woman you’ve got Mariama Ba, and you’ve got Achebe simply because he’s indispensable. But not only are Mine Boy and Boy! texts from the colonial era (and to me, they feel a lot more dated than the others), but a rather different principle of selection suggests itself if you compare their titles.

Which leads me back to continuing fascination with the ways the “Africa novel” is conceptualized through reference to states of immaturity (which I’ve been going on about already). In the case of Oyono and Abrahams, the “boy” of the title is a member of the first generation to leave the traditional home, the first to learn to read, and the first to have a conception of the outside world. This plot, in which the (inevitably male) protagonist becomes modern and literate at the same time as he becomes alienated from the “traditional” world, is a common plot structure among the writers of the late colonial and early independence era. Yet it’s also a very common way that African writers conceptualized their status as writers. In Achebe’s own uber-canonized Things Fall Apart, for example, the novel’s thematic center is the decision by Okonkwo’s oldest son to reject his father, convert to Christianity, and go to school. Yet this decision is also, in a very direct way, a formative event in Achebe’s own family history, which he was loosely fictionalizing: in the trilogy as he originally imagined it (he changed his plans soon after) the first novel would be about his grandfather’s time, the second about his father’s, and the third about his own. In other words, Things Fall Apart is not only a story about colonialism and traditional Igbo life, but it narrates the first branch in the genealogy of Achebe as writer, an originary moment defined by the rejection of the “traditionalism” that Okonkwo is taken to represent.

Achebe, however, is not the only innovator here. Indeed, it would be difficult to construct a meaningful timeline of the “African novel” without accounting for the centrality of the trope connecting literacy to the conditions of the novels‘ production themselves. Camara Laye’s first book, for example, L’Enfant Noir, (1953) is the story of a naïve young Guinean gone to Paris to be educated, told in the nostalgic register of an adult struggling to remember his lost childhood. He remembers (in terms of great pathos) the moment when he forgot the totem animal of his childhood, and the final image of the novel is the deracinated young writer, standing in the Paris metro, struggling to make sense of a metro map. He uses Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as his model, in other words, in order to perform the adult writer’s struggled remembrance of his childhood, a time defined by his not-yet-being-a-writer. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s first published novel was Weep Not, Child, a meditation on the meaning of European education in the midst of the Mau Mau rebellion which puts narrative pressure on the challenges of competing visions of manhood offered to the young Njeroge. Does one seek adulthood in the forest with a machete or in the schools with a pen? A large part of Ngugi’s subsequent career would be spent struggling to reconcile the choice both he and his protagonist made (to choose the pen) with the road not taken, the “traditionalist” anti-colonial resistance figured by Mau Mau. And Amos Tutuola’s first published novel (The Palm Wine Drinkard, 1952) is not only about the search for maturity occasioned by the death of the protagonist’s father (in which he leaves home, acquires a wife, confronts his mortality, etc), but, as I wrote here, its publication was rendered legible in the Western publishing media through a discourse on the youth of the African aesthetic (the novel, said Dylan Thomas, was written in “Young English”).

I could keep going on; not only is Wole Soyinka’s most popular book his Aké: The Years of Childhood, but Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps carried the trend into the eighties. But what interests me is the way that each of these texts, like Ferdinand Oyono’s La Vie de Boy and Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy are discussions of traditionalism that take, as their point of reference, a de-tribalizing African society (arguing for something by taking it’s existence for granted). Oyono’s La Vie de Boy, for example, pairs the protagonist’s failure to be circumcised (his status as “boy” in traditional terms) with the racial pejorative “boy” to make of this immaturity a kind of privileged status within a modernizing African, a society “young” in development terms yet, as growing and full of potential, clearly differentiated from the merely tribal society of its elders. In Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy, the “boys” who work in South Africa’s mines are used to figure the rising urban proletariat, displacing their traditional elders on the basis of the “modern” knowledge they acquire there and standing as representative of the future of South Africa precisely because they are boys. These novels, in other words, use the trope of the “boy” as a way of talking about the very practices of literacy in which they themselves are becoming privileged objects. They not only theorize about the role of writing, education, and literacy within a variety of modernizing African societies but they are, themselves, the texts through which these theories are practiced.

While the experience of the educated son displacing his “traditional” father was a common experience during both the colonial and early independence era, education and learning to read in English have not ceased to imply a profound class and generational alienation throughout sub-Saharan Africa (and, more specifically, in Tanzania). Broadly painting education as a “colonial” project doesn’t really help us conceptualize its continuing social function, of course. But I do think a focus on the continuing political meaning that seems to give the “boy” figure its privileged place in the educational curriculum helps illustrate why colonial-era texts focused on the trials and tribulations of the modernization project would still have such resonance, why the work they do might still be considered valuable pedagogical practice. And this line of thought makes me look at the current vogue in African “boy soldier” novels and memoirs with a certain amount of suspicion. If the “boy” novel had a certain meaning in a time when the West could still, without self-consciousness, imagine Africans as culturally young, what does it mean today that books like A Long Way Gone, God Grew Tired of Us, Beasts of No Nation, Johnny Mad Dog, and What is the What? assume such a large portion of the West’s small market for writing about Africa?

Sometimes dirty laundry gets clean on its own

I sometimes have the dream that I’m sitting in a café, reading or just staring out the window at the rain. There’s a lot of my stuff around me, books, computer, papers, bags, more books, bicycle, and on and on.  I’m talking a lot of stuff, like laundry, dishes with half-eaten meals, extra pairs of shoes, you name it.  No one seems to mind.  But it’s a lot of stuff. I sit and I drink coffee and I think to myself: “I should probably go home, I’m tired, and it’ll start raining soon.” But before I can leave, I’d need to pack up all my crap somehow, and there’s enough stuff there to fill a small Volkswagen. I can’t possibly put it all on my bike. We’re talking piles of electronics, flower vases, wires, a tape measure, scotch tape. I think there was a phone book too. Soon, the café will be closing, and they‘ll want me to leave.  It’s getting dark, and its raining harder. I’m not sure how I’ll get home.

But then, that’s not really my problem, is it? Inertia is on my side. Let them figure out how to get me out of here.

I’m just a link

I came across this via Acephalous. It’s the sort of thing I would blog about if they (and, to steal from this person’s list, Karnythia at The Angry Black Woman, Noli Irritare Leones, Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town, Burning Words, GallingGala, Feminocracy, Maia at Alas A Blog, Ottermatic, BastardLogic,The Rotund,Three Rivers Fog, Pam at Pandagon) hadn’t already weighed in. As she puts it:

“there has always been one broad and well-lit path for oppressed classes of people to “better themselves” — side with the oppressors against someone else. That is exactly what these images are depicting…”

Amen.