Apparently Bush entered office with the plan of invading Iraq, and the Pentagon has been honing its plans for the Iran invasion since 2005. The real reason for the new adventure is of course oil – and petro-euros. My neighbor theorizes that we are already there, and that when the invasion is revealed it will be as a fait accompli.
My feeling when I read the news alternates between a desire to jump into full time activism before it is too late, and serious thoughts of building a nest abroad. This is a fight or flight reaction, it seems to me, and one of the reasons I am glad I have started the current book project is that it calms my mind like a drug.
One of my jangled thoughts on the current situation is that I should try to get used to the idea that we are a dictatorship like any other, and learn to function anyway – as people do elsewhere. I said this to my mother.
My mother said: Actually it is worse than that. We are not in just any dictatorship. We are in a very agressive one which ruins countries one after another.
Z: I have the constant sense that we are in a state of emergency and that the attempt to lead a normal life is a charade.
M: Nobody is leading a normal life. Everyone is constantly on edge. The question of what we will do next, what will happen next, weighs on everyone all the time.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It’s not just the extremist of our governments that is to blame for our inner tenseness. It’s the extremist state of our economic and social systems. Powerful minds are inclined to fight a losing battle against such historical determinisms as our post-industrial mindsets (jaded from the experience of industrialism). I’m finding out about Levinas, but his project is doomed. How can we have an ethical relationship towards each other, when the system itself reinforced a categorisation of identity along arbitrary lines (fitting us for the work of reproducing the system as it is)?
Marechera is probably about as practically Levinasian as anyone can go these days — because he refused any category of identity, holding that to accept one would be dehumanising. (Perhaps, coming from rural Africa he had the advantage of seeing what the presumption of a modernist “knowledge” of the other did to human society, in terms of dehumanising its participants — he deals with such a subject in THE BLACK INSIDER, on the topic of “The Black Identity” Cf. Annie Gagliano on Marechera’s view about the invalidity of this category.)
But, Marechera was an anarchist and extreme — and only by maintaining an extreme outsider status was he able to maintain his ethical purity. Perhaps his approach is the only way to be fully ethical these days?
Very likely. (I should read the Black Insider. I have ordered a Marechera collection and it was to arrive now, but it has been delayed to December. I should go to the library and order another.)
It’s true about the extremist state of our social and economic systems. I don’t know Levinas at all well but I have the feeling that we are far too far gone for his ideas of ethics to work, at least in society.
Good that you have ordered a Marechera collection. Keep in mind that he was pure. It’s kind of an ethical and also existential purity. He was a newcomer to Modernism (as unpopular as the idea of a newcomer to Modernism might be!)
Newcomer to Modernism – this is what I have picked up. It is one of the main reasons why I am interested.
Good!
But please keep this strongly in mind — especially if and when you read THE BLACK INSIDER.
If you don’t understand the confusion and contempt in his rejection of modernism, the book will probably just seem quite incoherent –as I’m sure it appears to be to the majority of those who even try to read him.
I think I shall not be confused on that account …
I’m sure you won’t. Personally, I think his take identity politics = “The black identity” as a very obvious social construct and the African Society of Great Britain as a little cordoned off pseudo-Africa, wherein people made huge efforts to objectively appear to have put racism behind them, to be very funny indeed. (Marechera ended up throwing something through the window of the African society, which made one of Britain’s liberals’ feel like they had failed him.
But the key is here: [Owen] and I enjoyed the common and sordid freedom of being born in the slums and hacking our way out of them by the skin of scholarships. It gave both of us that inner knowledge of gritty insecurity which cements in some a love of intellectual pleasure and a particular distaste for the strictures of mediocre occupations.
oh, here it is.
(the quote about the Africa Centre):
I looked around, at the bar where a few blacks in national costume were standing, at the dining tables where the smart black faces were eating impeccably African food recommended by the Guardian, and at the side seats where little groups of black and white faces sat talking and drinking in an unmistakably non-racial way. Here then was the womb into which one could retreat to nibble at the warm fluids of an Africa that would never be anything other than artificial. A test-tube Africa in a brave new world of Bob Marley anguish Motown soul, reggae disco cool, and the added incentive of re-conceiving oneself in a friendly womb.
Gotcha! 🙂 Great quotations.
I think a lot of Marechera’s appearances of irrationality are traceable to his perception that what is being done in terms of addressing political issues is merely gesture. The problem, I think, is that in the minds of western liberals, liberalism is about as far left as you are able to go, in order to rectify political problems. Marechera’s approach to this has been to smash things or to aim bottles and so on at the heads of representative liberals (more literally than figuratively). This –further left – approach has consolidated his image as a madman in the eyes of some.
…and I forgot to say the crucial thing that I implied in my analysis — that reification (including the construction of ‘the black identity’) is more a part of late Modernism than it is anything else.
Here, in the comments section, are a few more statements I have made on that.
Hard to understand for some people, I know — but identity (including racial identity) — was far more of an ideologically entrenched affair in western culture, than it was for me under Rhodesian colonialism. It really is like well meaning westerners have to bend over backwards to combat their own entrenched ideas about race, because the categories that define identity here are so absolute. In my generation’s experience of Rhodesian culture (which may well have been very different from that of my parents), racial difference was more organically (rather than mechanistically — as in the west) defined. So, we could transverse boundaries through social interaction without feeling that we were taking up any particular political position in doing so. This was, of course, in the case of my generation — and of course there were variations, I suppose, in different individuals’ behaviour, but it was more or less along this line. I only learned later that I was supposed to have the negative and profoundly condescending attitudes towards blacks that westerns harboured themselves, and which they were keen to combat within themselves. I was not psychologically constructed in such a way that I felt the need to combat some kind of a priori presupposition of superiority within myself. I already felt that difference (virtually of any sort) was a manifestation of creativity in the world. My favourite compliment for someone was that they were “mad”. So, I had a very different way of looking at things way before I came to the western environment. I couldn’t believe the stiffness of people here, and their deeply held intentions to prove themselves in every way ‘not mad’.
Yes – although the modernisms with which I am most familiar are also colonial/’post-colonial’, on the margins, so I tend not to think of modernity / modernism so monolithically as do those who concentrate on the ‘central’ countries / the global North.
I am about to become more intelligent / incisive on these matters as a result of work on the new book.
Good.
Actually my current feelings are that modernism and its reifying tendencies are tied to modes of production and their logic.
Yes – I am quite sure this is true.