“It’s a pity nation-making moves only through a single groove like a one-track brain that is obsessed with the one thing. It is not enough to be in power but to be power itself and there is no such thing except in the minds of people with religious notions. We are a devastated garden in a time of drought in which only those weeds grow which are lean and hungry, like Cassius. The multitudes are thick with grey hairs. Their empty bellies propel them to the immediate source. A time will come when their thoughts are not their needs and then I say beware the blazing of their minds.
. . .
“Whatever we achieve is the evidence of our guilt. Always we are the desert island for which we secretly pine. There is nowhere to hide on the road to suicide. I have a power for explosive prevarication, like a chair on which all opinions can for a fashion sit. When I was a child I played childishly; when I became a man I put away the ghost of literary thought that stuffed me with attitudes in my student days. What is it, this vast room we clal the sky; these endless miles of reality thickly knit with grit? The waiter must stretch his lips if he wants to get the tips. We stand each to each like sides of rock once quarried mercilessly by blind Victorian adventurers who only sought the few gold veins in us. They have extracted the best part of our being and left us like this. I woke up long ago this morning with aches and pains in all the things I took for granted.
. . .
“Even the death certificate is not quite like me, said Lazarus when he came out of the tomb. Things always happen in the worst possible way, however hard one tries to unbend them. I can never look a rational thought straight in the eyes. Hate me if you wish, but not too offensively. And there I was yesterday hammering the typewriter keys with a worldliness not of this world. Thoughts like claws must be sheathed. Something always happens to show us how really blind we are. This is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. We cannot all afford the luxury of self-disgust but someone has to do the dirty work. That means – me. My hunger has stamina enough.”
—TBI 37-38.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
thanks this is really nice prose.
these endless miles of reality thickly knit with grit?
And the term, grit, in Marechera’s lips, seems to refer to the banality of oppression. (A variation of the term, “banality of evil”. I have concocted.)
He was told by his editors to write on African themes, and he protested that there was nothing pleasurable for him in writing about grit.
And yet the tone is so mystical.
not to turn every aesthetic pleasure into a teaching tool, but do you think this could be taught to undergrads? I like to teach only texts in western civ that knocked me on my a** when I read them, and I have been using The Wretched of the Earth. Students are not as impressed as I was. But the banality of oppression links well to Arendt, which we also read.
The Wretched of the Earth knocked me on my a** when I read it, but I wasn’t an undergraduate. I think I’d have gotten it then too, though. This: I would have liked it as an undergrad, but my undergraduates in foreign languages couldn’t handle it … they’re not lit people, they’re language people (or so they believe) and they can’t get even much easier things. The Honors ones, and some of those in Humanities and of English / Comp Lit, might.
The underlying point is a spiritual point — for want of a much better term. He is trying to diagnose why he feels so “subtracted from” himself. So there are all sorts of sociopolitical reasons, as well as the simpler reason of being in exile in Britain.
I don’t think that this concept of being “subtracted from oneself” is an easy concept for most people — especially Westerners — to grasp. Western society is so based around the enhancement of the ego, that it seems anti-intuitive to consider what it might be like to be subtracted from oneself. However, when I and my friend Maya both migrated (I to Australia, her to Switzerland, we both felt subtracted from ourselves). This could be due to the lack of ego training we were given in our original culture, which made it harder for us to feel psychologically whole outside of our originative context:
“When I came to Switzerland I struggled a lot too and just could not function in our society.
Only since 1999 have I been able to keep a job. Beforehand I used to get fiered and people just wouldn’t believe in me.
I can feel so well when you write about not existing and you describe it so truthfully.”
So I think what Marechera is describing is in many ways culturally specific (but also has the postcolonial critique of third world exploitation).
I think the former would be a complex concept to convey.
I have the same problem though and I am from full-on West. But I am subtracted from myself when:
– below sea level
– in monotonous terrain
– in non-research universities
– in small towns
– in general small mindedness
– in Anglo-Saxon culture
– in the Bible Belt
– etc.
and it *is* because of not having the kind of ego training one needs to impose oneself, etc.
but I don’t want that kind of ego training because it is impedes people from being able to learn foreign languages or acquire new systems / cultures
So it is a paradox.
You are right that it is a paradox. Yes, the West is not fully even in its cultural proclivities — there are some who are less rather than more oriented towards an egoistically conditioned perspective. But generally, I think, if you were brought up in the West, you have probably had some pretty thorough ego training — which is not separable from the training of paying attention to the Panopticon. (How one appears in the eyes of others is essential to know if one is intent on adopting an egoistic approach and perspective.)
How one appears in eyes of others. This seems to be one of the things I don’t think about enough, or not evenly enough … ? or so I am told.
Anyway, I don’t know, and I think the blanket category West is too broad … lends itself to caricature?
I wasn’t intending to caricature the West. Just that, you probably haven’t had the experience of learning and then constantly relearning that “the universal” or the conventional norms for humanity are anything but. What is one to do with this disovery. Obviously it is verboten to consider naming any cause. One should just accept and knuckle down and try to do one’s best when what everybody else around one is terming “universal” happens not to be what one identifies with. But one should avoid caricaturing, or even the danger of that. It could cause bad feelings.
I thought that what traditional schools and so on considered “universal” was northwestern Europe, male, etc.? As in, it is “universal” that it snows on Christmas – except that it doesn’t in most places I’ve spent any time…
It is universal to have an ego that is pretty much defined by Freudian psychology (but this psychology relates to the pattern of European development, its panopticon, and the bourgeois nuclear family in hierarchical bourgeois class society). It is universal to wish for material accumulation as a measure of success and class status (but this relates to capitalist models that are ideologically purer in the West). It is universal for us to be concerned with what others think as a primary measure of our success — but this relates to ego psychology that is not so strong in other parts of the world.
And yes — if you depart from these conventional assumptions or “universals” in a thesis, you do need to go out of the way to explain yourself, or you will hardly be understood.
I think it was in Reeducation that I finally met or else finally got caught in these universals – actually that *was* its trick, because to claim difference was to be “in denial.”
I did meet attempts at them earlier on, in school, but they were always easy to argue – explain that what is being presented as universal is actually culturally specific. That’s pretty easy to do in Comp. Lit., people are amenable to it … it tends to be harder in English, I’ve noticed.
Hm.. I see. Sorry to use your blog for all sorts of things but I’m not sure how else to contact you relatively urgently. Stewart is asking for the money control number. he said: noone knows the net work can go down again maybe for longer and last time western un ion had not been giving cash for two weeks.Its politics time ,anything can happen.
I’ll get in touch.
Thanks.
The problem with caricaturing anything is not how people may react, it is that it raises the barriers to perceiving difference and thus dampens the possibility for critique. If the West were as monolithic as either its fans or its detractors sometimes suggest, we might not be having this conversation–a general point that Allan Bloom et al. missed.
We have the problem or advantage in western civ courses in the U.S. (are there “western civ” courses elsewhere? the whole thing seems like a US American construct to me anyway) that all of the texts have to be taught in English, as there is no way that the students could master the panoply of languages that would be required. I have negative feelings about this, but the disciplinary boundaries are so high and the insistence on “coverage” so strong that we won’t take the time to consider these texts in their features as texts very seriously. I myself didn’t read Fanon in the original and it still bowled me over, so I have some hope nonetheless.
“…it is that it raises the barriers to perceiving difference and thus dampens the possibility for critique.”
Yes. And there’s this whole issue of overlap – I work on the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America and both of these are in the West and also not, etc. and in different positions than some other countries within West, etc. etc.
Western Civ. – they have it in Latin America, too. They argued a lot about it and its canon in the early 19th century, with Independence. How to stop having a colonial and colonizing education system, etc. But it is still taught in a very traditional way there, too. It’s interesting: is “western civ.” something that has to be taught in the colonies, to civilize us???
It hits me that that is what “diversity” (which I usually think is discussed in too weak and boring a way) is about. The traditional western civ course flattens things out, everything is part of a development to a culmination, part of the growth of western civilization (it rises, grows hegemonic, but also keeps getting more civilized). With the idea of diversity one can at least talk about unevenness and bumpiness, and not structure things so that we (or someone), at the end, gets presented as the culmination…
Your overlap issue is what bowled me over about Fanon and why I have taught it so frequently in western civ: because Fanon went to France thinking he was a citizen and learned that he was an “other.” I.e., the ways in which western civ universalizes its discourse about rights and then simultaneously excludes some people. When the students get that far I ask them to go back in the texts that preceded Fanon and see if there were clues that this was going to happen: and they always find them. But then, my course ends with genocides, not as ever more civilization. I am always surprised when I hear that people are still teaching the “rise of the West” narrative in their western civs–but this has a lot to do with textbooks. I try to avoid using any kind of textbook, preferring to use just texts.
In other words: you can use western civ to show the fault lines of “diversity”. But you have point your finger right at the people who are simultaneously in and out, and that can be hard to accomplish in the classroom.
I promise, Servetus, Western civilisation is NOT my “god”. We have, so far, eliminated Hegel, Nietzsche and Marechera as my gods. But we can go on adding to the list if necessary. Be assured that I do not “believe in” Western civilisation, nor do I see it as a monolith. I’m not sure where those ideas (e.g. concerning monolith) come from, but not from me. I would hesitate to say that they emerge from a culture or subculture not my own.
I’ve been thinking about this: “Western society is so based around the enhancement of the ego…” I’d qualify it, I think, adding an adjective like mainstream, or Anglo-Saxon, or something. It’s true that it’s a norm but it’s far from universal. The other thing is that I define “West” very broadly. That could be an academic deformation, I don’t know. But I don’t consider Latin America and the Caribbean to be outside Western culture, and my university wouldn’t let a course on Marechera count for the non-Western literature requirement because he writes in English and has all of this intertextuality with the Western canon. They’d let you read Marechera instead of T.S. Eliot, but not instead of the Ramayana.
So, as I work my way towards the definition of a certain PHENOMENON that cries out for something other than an absence of terminology to describe it, I start to feel that what I want to label “Western” is the sensation of experiencing an attitude of “power over” as a means of determining identity, rather than communication or a dialectical approach to engagment with the other and determining identities. So it is this “power over” thing that I define as Western — in congruence, I think, with the global situation of Western power/s as being currently dominant.
So I find that those I experience as “Westerners” have a predilection for a prioris when determining identities. They tend to label me and tell me what I am — without really engaging me in conversation that has any depth to it. That makes the issue of identity very contentious and fraught with agonistic aspects, rather than being something negotiated in a more ready and friendly aspect. This attitude of “power over” is something I understand to stem from a particular kind of cultural training (which I distinguish very much from my own nativistic training). It also logically stems from those who are (perhaps relatively?) used to not having to negotiate for a position of power or identity, but are rather much more used to telling others who they are, and what they are worth. Thus it in an attitude that logically stems from those who are culturally dominant on the global scene of economics and culture.
Western as “power over,” etc., I see it but I only see that emanating regularly from white men of a certain class and in some cases a female version of that, or a non white version of that.
I see it all the time. Is it ironic that it appears most (to my eyes) in books that are deliberately and overtly self-reflexive? For instance I read in a book yesterday something in this tone, “Ah we are all inclined to schematise our ideas about the shamanistic wildman, calling him this and that because of our Western stereotypes! But! Above all he is a male, an ultra-masculinist courageous type. He knows what side his gender is buttered on, and I can say that from the point of view of really not being Western at all, somehow.”
Was this an academic or a popular source? (D***** ignorant person, either way.)
Well what I read was actually much more subtle than my rather facetious interpretation. But listen to this:
[The space of death as a threshold in which the healer walks] may spook us all, the zone into which, willy-nilly, all the stereotypes of “soul-flight” and of “shamanism,” that Western projection of a Siberian name, finds life in a language of heroic restraint generally awfully male, poetic, originary, and so on.” ( p 448)
[self-reflexive blah]
“It is certainly not necessarily solitary, this depth-space, even if it has till now been persistently male.” (p 448)
[[Western gender lens nonetheless blah]
–Michael Taussing, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1987.
That is pretty d***** funny … I love your translation!
(Is this why I have never had the patience to read Taussig?)
(Is this why I have never had the patience to read Taussig?)
Could be. I find that my patience is stretched to a limit with some of these books.
Yes … ! … writers and locutions like these are worth an article at least. Although one would likely “make enemies” by writing it (another problem with academia).
Tell me more about making enemies. I am constantly warned about this but stepping lightly has never been an innate skill.
Ai, that is a long question. I should make a post and have an open thread on it. For example, you tell someone like Taussig who has a lot invested in being non mainstream that they are mainstream, and they see you are right and so they hate you. To avlid it the article in question would have to be very scientifically and objectively written and cover a whole class of people, and be sure never to have anything in it that could possibly be construed as an ad hominem. In that case the article could make you a star, and then they would love you instead.
I see. Actually it is quite interesting, but I am really getting quite beyond any tendency to write in a way that could possibly be construed as ad hominem. I mean, my self that thinks that others are funny and amusing and deserve to be picked up on their obliviousness and quirks is quickly being overtaken by the idea that academics as a class do not really exist in any complex human sense. As I start to see them more as modernist production machines I lose any interest in attacking them personally.
Modernist production machines, I like that.
However, in Taussig’s favour, he does speak of needing to EXPERIENCE the heart of darkness in order to really understand it. I detect a slight nonconformist tendency in that — and it is also true of Marechera’s works. One cannot categorise them intellectually and claim to understand.
..but like most academics he has a kind of foppish earnestness in urging us to pay attention. By contrast Marechera’s tone is much more the real thing — sharp and pure.
YES. All very true.