Distortion of Reality

Assumptions of European superiority arose during the period of European imperialism, which started slowly in the 16th century, accelerated in the 17th and 18th centuries and reached its zenith in the 19th century. After discussing some aspects of colonial structural constructs which had painful effects on the colonized peoples as seen by some post-colonial critics, I will touch upon the need of recovery of the colonized peoples. Such aspects of painful experiences are largely treated from different perspectives by a range of intellectuals such as Fanon, Spivak, and Gandhi, to name the most revolutionary ones, and Edward Said, and Bhabha, Rushdie or C. Achebe, who proposed a milder approach. But they all speak about a distortion of reality made by the colonizing culture, a culture that used its military dominance accompanied by cultural knowledge to exert its hegemony over the colonized peoples.

Reality has been distorted to the benefit of the colonizing powers ever since imperialism existed. The native has been painted in a negative way by the settlers from the very outset of the colonial process. In The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon quotes Monsieur Meyer, the representative of the French imperial power in Algeria, and describes how the native is gradually portrayed as a kind of quintessence of evil. Not only is he presented as invaluable, but he is seen as the negation of values:

he is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil…the corrosive element, destroying all that comes over him: he is the deforming element…the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. (Fanon, Wretched 40)

These words were uttered by the French official in front of the French National Assembly before the start of the Algerian war and what they denote is an undoubtedly superior if not a violent attitude towards the natives. The native has thus been condemned to immobility and to inferiority from the very beginning. The native, or the colonized, is taught to stay in his place and not to go beyond certain limits.

Fanon also explains why these confinements to which the native has been subjected turn into violence. This is why the native’s dreams are of action and oppression. What he cannot do during the day he dreams of doing at night. These dreams start then to burst out in various forms. First of all, the native reacts violently against his fellow beings: “The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. The impulse to take the settler’s place implies a tonicity of muscles the whole time” (52). This muscular tension leads to bloodthirsty explosions of different forms—tribal wars, religious feuds, terrorist attacks and fights between individuals. Fanon continues saying that by this collective self-destruction the native’s muscular tension eases. In my view, Fanon’s theory is applicable to contemporary neocolonialism practiced by the West, namely by the United States. There is nothing less obvious today than what is happening in the occupied Irak where the Shia fights the Sunni, suicide bombs explode killing both occupying force soldiers and fellow citizens or in the West Bank and Gaza Strip where Palestinian grenade-strapped youths blow themselves up in despair or in Groznai where Chechen fighters fight to the last drop of life. According to Fanon, this pattern of conduct is that of a death reflex when confronted with danger, a suicidal behaviour. To the Christian settler, who scorns suicidal acts, this is a proof that the natives are not reasonable human beings

But there are other reasons why the colonized peoples moved to violence against the settlers. At first, there are nationalist political parties which during the colonial period hold dissertations on themes like the human rights and self-determination, human dignity and the like. These parties produce elites who give hope, though tacitly, to the wretched. An eloquent example of such a case is Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was a milder ideologist than Fanon as far as the native’s fight for freedom is concerned. Still, it is worth discussing the two persons’ views contrastively.

Whereas Gandhi has a religio-political discourse, Fanon’s vocabulary resembles Sartre’s existential humanism. If Gandhi talks about a theology of non-violence after his encounter with British imperialism, Fanon’s experience of French colonialism produces a theory calling for collective violence. However, there are many similarities between the two thinkers at least from the position they are speaking; they both study in the colonizing country; they both prepare their anti-colonialist theories in a third country—Gandhi in South Africa and Fanon in Algeria; they both deny the nationalist policy of the elitist parties in their countries and militate for a decentralized polity closer to the needs of the huge uninformed mass of the Indian and Algerian peasantry.

In addition to this, Gandhi and Fanon think alike in their proposal of a radical style of complete resistance to the totalising political and cultural offensive of the colonial civilizing mission. They insist on the psychological resistance to colonialism: ’Total liberation is that which concerns all sectors of the personality” (Fanon, Black Skin 250).

By previously stating that “the dominant psychological feature of the colonized is to withdraw before any invitation of the conquerors” (250), Fanon’s vision is that the only way of resisting is by refusing the privilege of recognition to the colonial master. In turn, Gandhi laments the Indian desire for the superficiality of modern civilization. Here is what he says: “We brought the English, and we keep them. Why do you forget that our adoption of their civilization makes their presence in India at all possible? Your hatred against them ought to be transferred to their civilization” (Gandhi 66).

Another similitude in Fanon and Gandhi is their common vision on national liberation as an imagination pretext for cultural self-determination from Europe and as an attempt to exceed the claims of Western civilization. In his second book, Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon proposes the following:

Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth’ By this defiant attitude, he calls for alterity or cultural difference. In this book, he invokes both Hegel and Sartre to render the condition of the colonized slave as a symptom of ‘imitativeness. (252)

Gandhi has a similar view preferring the English rule without the English: “you want the tiger’s nature but not the tiger” (Gandhi 30). To put it differently, the only progress was to render the English, the ’tiger’, as undesirable. It is with these powerful attempts to demistify the claims of Western civilization that Fanon and Gandhi rewrite the narrative of Western or Eurocentric modernity. Industrialization is seen as the story of economic exploitation, technology is combined with warfare and the history of medicine is related by Fanon to the techniques of torture. While Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj narrates the structural violence of Western modernity, Fanon denounces the European myths of progress and humanism.

When discussing civilization, Fanon laments: “When I search for man I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders” (Black Skins 252). Similarly, in an interview given to a British journalist, Gandhi, when asked what he thought about the English civilization, he answered: “I think it would be a good idea” (quoted in Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands 138).

Therefore, we may differentiate two types of colonial dominance—a violent colonialism that dealt effectively with the physical conquest of territories and which took place chronologically; and a more insidious one, a cultural colonialism pioneered by rationalists, modernists and liberals who occupied the minds, selves and cultures of the colonized. Thus, there emerged an elaboration of some strategies of profusion that helped persuade the colonized the idea that imperialism was really a messianic harbinger of civilization to the uncivilized world. On such a matter Edward Said developed a coherent point of view. In his now famous Orientalism and in his later book, Culture and Imperialism, not only does he consider the colonized as being purportedly orientalized, that is, portrayed by the Western scholars in such a way as to acknowledge their inferiority, but he also demonstrates how the others have been in desperate need of being represented. Beginning his book with Disraeli’s words who said in Tancred that “the East is a career” (Said, Orientalism 1), Said details the subtle elaboration of French and British colonial systems to which culture in general and literature in particular contributed to a great extent. He directs attention to the discursive and textual production of colonial meanings and to the creation of a structure of attitude and reference and of a consolidated vision of colonial hegemony. By analyzing a range of colonial texts and other cultural products, Said created the mostly debated aspect of postcolonial theory. What he does is the exploration of the historical imbalanced relationship between the world of Islam, the Middle East and the Orient on the one hand, and that of European and American imperialism on the other.

Said postulates a unique understanding of colonialism and imperialism as the cultural attitude which accompanies the habit of ruling distant territories. This vision is reiterated in Culture and Imperialism where he writes:

Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accummulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of domination … the vocabulary of classic nineteenth century imperial culture is plentiful with such words and concepts as ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’, ‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ’expansion’ and ‘authority. (8)

Following Mikhail Bakhtin's assertion that hell is the “absolute lack of being heard” (Bakhtin, Discourse 126), it can be argued that non-European and non-white peoples were living in such a kind of hell during most of the period of colonization.

The term ‘Orientalism’ itself is seen as a project of teaching, writing about and researching the Orient. Orientalism, as a discipline, has been an essential cognitive inducement to Europe’s imperial adventures in the hypothetical ‘East’. In his vision, Orientalism is nothing but a “Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (Orientalism 3).

To put it differently, according to this theory, the West elaborated a consolidated discourse by which it managed to produce the Orient politically, ideologically, militarily and imaginatively. Therefore, we know the Orient as it has been presented to us by the Western colonial discourse. Orientalism, which always presented Christendom as superior and as a representation of European domination of the Orient, served to enhance hostility between Islam and Christianity. This Western attitude is related to the spread of Islam over a large part of the Western world at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a threat which represented a lasting trauma to the Europeans and provoked what Samuel Huntington called “a clash of civilizations” between the two unequal halves of the world. The latter’s theory was recently heavily attacked by Said in a lecture he gave at MIT in Boston called “The Myth of the Clash of Civilization” labeling Huntington’s theory as a continuation of the Cold War (Said, “Myth”).

Therefore, the Orient is, in Said’s terms, an arbitrary construct of Western culture, invented as a sweepingly wholesale and basically negative, though fascinating, mirror image which serves to cast a positive light on the West or to give the Occident its identity. The West first constructs the East as its cultural Other and then it makes the other conform to the Western image. Every instance of European curiosity about the Other, from Flaubert to Marx, from Austen to Conrad, from Dickens to Verdi, was part of a great project to exploit and remake what westerners saw as a positive rich, but ultimately contemptible ‘Oriental’ sphere. This idea perfectly pervades Disraeli’s words put in the mouth of Lord Macaulay, “the East is a Career, ” with which Said starts his discourse. The context of Lord Macaulay’s words is his considering India as both a barbarous source of potential riches and as a huge tract in need of civilization. Said goes on and says that these constructs of debasement and “otherness” that were used until the 19th century, were still in use at the end of the 20th century. Such an attitude results from a character from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha, who is an immigrant in London and who acknowledges the Western power of representation: “They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (168).

One of the main features of postcolonial literatures is the issue of the colonized people’s recovery of the relationship between self and place. In their study on postcolonial literatures entitled The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin point out the dialectic of place and displacement as being the defining model of postcolonial literatures. The sense of self may have been eroded primarily by the cultural oppression the native personality has undergone. A new generation of educated natives such as Hanif Kureishi, Thimothy Mo, Chinua Achebe, Hgungi wa Thiongo, Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie was finally able to use the tools they acquired through their encounter with the West to combat those representations, opening up new galaxies of ideas and creating new literary spheres. In those spheres new ways of reading and writing paved the way for new perspectives, broke ground for new avenues of thought, decoding the deep-seated images of colonial representation and re-coding new images of the self in order to escape the chain that was all too signifying.

Thus, from that moment on, there emerged what Chinua Achebe called “the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession” (79). At the same time, Said declares his desire to transcend what he calls “a rhetoric of blame” and to adopt “what might be called a comparative literature of imperialism” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 18). Thus, Said’s aim in re-reading those canonical works of empire is far from “condemning or ignoring their participation in what was an unquestioned reality in their society" (xiv). It is rather an attempt to read and understand, even to appreciate, them without being implicated in their ideological messages and hegemonic influences. Consequently, Said aims not simply to prove the falsity of the image of the Oriental in Western discourse, but rather to point out the fact of its being a discourse. This fact, in itself, explains how these reductive images have been transformed, through language, into truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. Here Said quotes Nietzsche’s opinion that truths are but “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms... which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (Said, Orientalism 203). Hence, the process of unveiling their systematic nature as part of a whole discourse becomes, for Said, the first step in deconstructing them.

⇐ Предыдущая 1 234 5 6 7 8 Следующая ⇒