Invisible Others

Here’s Tabish Khair in The Hindu on reading Rushdie and others as Indian or Caribbean. It’s a bit thin on actual arguments but a very nice read nonetheless.

After a very short period of looking around, the West has increasingly turned its gaze onto itself in recent years. There it stands in front of gilded mirrors, gazing at itself in admiration. What it sees is no longer the whiteness it saw in the far past. What it sees now is multi-hued, variously dressed, many voiced. For, the Western self, particularly in literary and cultural circles, has long accepted the fact of being creolised. Even the opponents of multiculturalism cannot see themselves (thank god for small mercies) as snow white. When the West gazes into its mirrors, it sees its own new post-war multicultural self. It sees Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru, Zadie Smith. And it likes to pretend that it is seeing the Other. (…) There are other Asian, African, post-colonial writers, but they are hardly visible today. After a short period in which at least some Western critics and writers were genuinely interested in difference, in other cultures — a period that enabled the publication of novels like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — the West is back to gazing at gilded mirrors. And by chanting the mantra of “global” literature or multiculturalism, the West conveniently forgets that the reflections it sees in those mirrors are, after all, its own.

Ed O’Loughlin: Not Untrue And Not Unkind

O’Loughlin, Ed (2009), Not Untrue And Not Unkind, Penguin
ISBN 978-1-844-88185-7

I used to look forward to the announcement of the Booker long- and shortlist and the eventual winner. Many books and writers I hold dear I pilfered off those lists, but in recent years I’ve found the Booker judges’ decisions and choices frequently bewildering. Now, I’m well aware that people tend to complain about prizes a lot, claiming objective stances for their own peculiar tastes. So, I’m well aware that it’s my literary taste-buds that led me to disliking Hensher’s last novel and loving Rushdie’s most recent. So what I said is not a general complaint about the deterioration of culture or literary prizes, it’s a personal complaint, a dissatisfaction with the reliability of literary authorities. It’s laziness, basically. Thus, it won’t do to start with winners or short-listed writers; as I commenced to do last year, I’ll start reading books at random off of the longlist, hopefully turning up a gem or two. This here, Ed O’Loughlin’s debut novel Not Untrue And Not Unkind is the first of those reads and most certainly not a gem. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the worst book on this year’s longlist. It’s just a thoroughly bad novel, a disappointment on almost every level, although there is much that is, potentially, interesting about this book’s enterprise, starting with the structure, which appears, at first, to be intriguing.

Not Untrue And Not Unkind contains two narratives, basically, both relayed to us through a first person narrator named Owen, who’s a journalist and reporter. One, we could call it the frame narrative, although that would not be quite true, is set in Dublin, the other is set in various countries in Africa. The Dublin narrative tells us about the inside workings of a newspaper and it is roughly divided into past and present. The past part is about Owen’s faltering career in the newsroom, doing odd jobs, hoping for a promotion, before deciding to try his hand at freelance reporting in Africa. But, as in the Africa section, the contexts and environments are kind of blended into the background while Owen is busy drawing a portrait of the people in these environments (without making any insightful connections between one and the other, really). The character he’s centrally occupied with in these parts, is Cartwright, a mean editor, who keeps tabs on ‘his’ journalists, compiling, as it turns out, extensive reports on each. He enjoys confronting and humiliating them over their mistakes and errors, to which end he invites them out for a coffee where he takes his time to slowly erode and dismember their self-esteem. It is after such a humiliation (although not necessarily because of it) that Owen decides to go to Africa. The present part sets in after Cartwright vanishes and Owen goes through his desk (and, later, his apartment), remembering his past life as a journalist and reporter.

Cartwright is a catalyst of sorts and in one of the final chapters you can clearly see how O’Loughlin means to use this narrative to close the meandering Africa story but the book rather hobbles to a close, adding chapters upon chapters that make the obvious just more obvious; to be honest, I felt manhandled by the author during the closing pages, due to the relief of finishing the book, however, I wasn’t overly bothered by it. But the fact remains that the author doesn’t appear to have confidence in his own creations. The poet James Merrill once, famously, said, roughly, that whenever he stalled in writing a poem, he focused on the objects in the poem, the furniture and things like that. Not Untrue And Not Unkind is not that kind of novel. The environment just consists of props for O’Loughlin’s characters and they themselves are but hastily constructed scaffolds for his plot and other ideas. This is something to regret when encountering characters such as Cartwright, where we can almost smell the wasted potential. Like the close of the book, wasted potential is marked by the reader’s disappointment at the end of the book. Throughout the book I kept thinking there was more good stuff in the back, more good stuff to come, that all this was just preparatory, that it was a lead-in for something that would make reading all the toss worth it, until the great catastrophe near the end disabused me of such a notion. Cartwright’s character is unrealized but then he doesn’t play such a major role in the book.

A much larger role is played by Owen’s fellow journalists in the sections of the book that deal with Africa, and the flaws of O’Loughlin’s characterizations are more of a problem there, as is his disregard for contexts and environments. Superficially, these sections are quite interesting. We, who usually only consume the end product of journalistic work, get to see the photographers and writers at work, but actually, we hear little about that aspect of their lives. When we do, it can be arresting, and O’Loughlin is clearly capable of constructing compelling images, such as a correspondent who is confined to a small room where he talks to TV stations around the world and there, in his chair, in front of the camera he spends his life waiting for the next call, slowly going mad. Images like this are very few and far between. Most of the time, we hear the journalists bicker, drink, fall in and out of love with one another. The group of journalists isn’t a constant entity, people drift in and out again, the only constant is Owen. The literary reference that came to mind when I read the book was Ernest Hemingway’s masterful The Sun Also Rises, which is, I think, one of the best short books of its time, or of its century. One of my favorite novels, in any case.

There is much that connects these two books, but O’Loughlin falls short in almost every respect. Now, it’s no big flaw to fall short of as well made a novel as The Sun Also Rises but it is if the results are as singularly uninteresting as they are in this case. It’s a big risk to assume the stance, to use the tools that Hemingway uses. He himself, in some late novels, showed how easily this kind of writing turns into dullness, into unconvincing posture. What aggravates the problem in Not Untrue And Not Unkind is the fact that everything else that Owen talks about becomes unconvincing as well, and this is a problem with a book that tackles as fickle a subject as African politics and their reflection in the Western media. For a novel of places, a novel that is concerned with all kinds of places in Africa (it does mark places in Africa as places, in contrast to Dublin, which is basically the unmarked backdrop to the whole thing), it is remarkably weak on that count as well. All the African countries are treated as one big ‘African’ country, except for the few passages that contain explicit references to persons and events. This approach completely wipes out any possibility to understand something or to have any kind of insight into any of these events. All we have is a group of vaguely neurotic journalists who travel through Africa, taking notes and pictures. It’s not actually bad, just uninteresting. Disappointing. It’s not moving nor intellectually challenging in any way. It’s just there.

Even the huge amount of violence in the book doesn’t change that. Although, again, O’Loughlin is capable of producing affecting images, as he demonstrates in the story of a man mistakenly left for dead, he makes little enough use of this capability. Mostly, we are confronted with images that are calculated to shock but fail to achieve that goal. There is a weird kind of economy behind this writing, as if the author drew up a table, assigning moments of shock to a portion of the book and moments of emotional distress to others and so forth. They are not genuinely shocking, they are there as objects, the intent to shock in plain sight, which thwarts any opportunity to actually shock or move somebody. However, I may have come to this opinion due to the fact that I was reading a literary novel. Had I encountered the same in a newspaper, in a magazine or something similar, I may not have judged it so harshly; because this, really, is another point of reference for the Africa sections. It all reads rather like routine journalism, spruced up to fit a novel. This explains why it’s so disappointing yet at the same time rather decently written, decently structured, and so on.

The sprucing up also explains why so many ideas appear to be pasted onto the book. One of those ideas is a rather ineptly done metafictional element, with one of the characters writing a thinly disguised memoir with the title “Not Untrue and Not Unkind”, a book that Owen has less than kind words to say about. The infrequent essayistic remarks feel similarly out of place. One of the most memorable one of them is about the changes in journalistic practice which, Owen tells us, is more and more about rewriting, regurgitating the same babble over and over and not going into the field anymore. But, the reader may ask, if these morons in the field, dense as a log of wood, if we source our news from their reports, how is that better? It’s certainly not going to help with insights. Yet, at the same time, this exact question might be one of Not Untrue And Not Unkind‘s points. It is undeniable that there is one, only one, well-drawn character, and that’s Owen himself. His observations, his thoughts, his perceptions, they paint a vivid picture of a deeply unsympathetic person, one who is in a position to help shape public opinion on important issues but who appears to not be qualified to do this in a helpful and satisfying manner. If it was his intention to show this, he succeeded admirably.

It does not, however, make reading the book more of an enjoyable experience. It’s a point well made but the dullness of the whole book can be exhausting, as is the ham-handed way that Owen has with Africa, writing and other issues. At least it’s a light enough read. Maybe it’s a better book than I make it out to be, maybe I’m being misled by my disappointment. But really, even if all this sounds harsh, I’ve been holding back. Some of its portrayal of Africa is highly problematic and having Owen as a lens doesn’t protect the book at all times. If you trust me, don’t read it. It’s not worth your time or your money. Let’s hope it doesn’t get shortlisted.

Orient-Ation

This great rumination on xkcd:

Skrupellose Asiaten

Spiegel online über die Übernahme der Dresdner Bank

Zum anderen haben die Chinesen nie auch nur andeutungsweise veröffentlicht, was genau sie denn mit der Dresdner Bank vorhaben, warum sie sie kaufen wollen. Eine solche Geheimnistuerei darf nicht belohnt werden. Und wie skrupellos Asiaten mit Zusagen umgehen, hat der Fall Siemens/BenQ unlängst bewiesen – auch wenn hier mit Taiwan Nationalchinesen verantwortlich waren.

Aimé Césaire is dead

Obit in the NYT

Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of black pride, died here on Thursday. He was 94.

A government spokeswoman, Marie Michèle Darsières, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.

Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city.

In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude,” a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.

Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.

Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”

History of Islam (paradoxe du bouquiniste)

On Helen de Witt’s wonderful blog I found this

Urvoy points out an oddity which he calls the paradoxe du bouquiniste. Anyone who spends a lot of time at secondhand bookstalls finds an image of the history of French thought in the 18th century quite different from what he was taught. In his studies they would have talked only of thinkers who were opposed to established religion, above all to religious orthodoxy; but in the bookstalls one finds a vast army of defenders of the faith, names one has never heard of, or heard of only as someone who criticised Rousseau… Since the Renaissance, he suggests, we have placed emphasis on originality, on individualism, so our intellectual history devalues whatever was typical of its time, rates highly whatever was at least self-proclaimed as original. Books offer us chapters on great individuals, with perhaps a dutiful chapter on background which the reader feels free to ignore.

In the history of Arab thought, on the other hand, the opposite is true. It has been written not by philosophers but by historians, and they privilege “representative” authors. The Arab philosophers who drew on the Greek philosophical tradition have just about managed to get taken seriously because of their immense influence on Scholasticism – but many Islamic scholars regard them askance as marginal thinkers. Attention was concentrated on the religious apologists, who were seen as expressing the essence of Arabic-Islamic thought. [I am writing this awkward English because paraphrasing DU, something I do very badly.]

Urvoy comments: the enterprise of setting out a collective structure of thought, with occasional detailed studies of individuals, is entirely legitimate. But isn’t there something odd about this radical antithesis between the study of Western and of Arab thought? Can it really be right for the Arabist to concentrate solely on writers whose equivalents he would despise if he were a specialist of the 18th-century in France?

Martin the Dread

Kakutani on Amis’ new book

Equally offensive are the eruptions of anti-Islamic vituperation […].

In this book Mr. Amis says that, going through airport security with his daughters, he wants to say something like: “Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on airplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick, for now, to young men who look like they’re from the Middle East.”

Reviewing Mark Steyn’s controversial book, “America Alone” — which forecasts a dark future in which Old Europe falls under the influence of Islamic fundamentalism — Mr. Amis writes that “not a single Western European country is procreating at the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1 births per woman,” adding: “A depopulated and simplified Europe might be tenable in a world without enmity and predation. And that is not our world. The birth rate is 6.76 in Somalia, 6.69 in Afghanistan and 6.58 in Yemen.”

Mr. Amis writes of an Islamist “death-hunger,” comparable “outside Africa” only to what existed in Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea. He suggests that the Islamist war on the West is “a kind of thwarted narcissism,” rooted in sexual frustration and anger at Islam’s impotence on the world stage (completely ignoring the experts like Michael Scheuer, the former C.I.A. officer and Qaeda specialist, who argue that Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war is a reaction to specific United States foreign policies like support for Israel and an American presence in Muslim lands). And while he writes that “we respect Muhammad” (just not “Muhammad Atta”), he makes gross generalizations about the “extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture” and the differences between Sunnis and Shias (“The Sunni are more legalistic. The Shia are dreamier and more poetic and emotional.”)

As for civil war between the Shia and the Sunni, Mr. Amis glibly declares: “We can say, with the facetiousness of despair, that it’s just as well to get this out of the way; and let us hope it is merely a Thirty Years’ War, and not a Hundred Years’ War.”

[…]

Many of the arguments in this book are deeply indebted to other writers. On Islam, Mr. Amis leans heavily on the works of Bernard Lewis, the Middle East scholar who influenced the thinking of some members of the Bush administration. And on the irrationality of religion, he leans heavily on the work of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Mr. Amis adds nothing illuminating to these writers’ thinking, while blindly accepting some of their more debatable assertions.

Aktion Wir helfen Broder

Würden wir nicht jeden Tag von Selbstmordattentaten im Namen Allahs lesen, bei denen Hunderte von Menschen massakriert werden, wären die Attentäter vom 11. September nicht gläubige Muslime gewesen, die davon überzeugt waren, dass sie göttlichen Willen vollstrecken und dafür im Paradies belohnt werden, wüssten wir nicht von öffentlichen Hinrichtungen an Homosexuellen und Steinigungen von Frauen im Gottesstaat der Ajatollahs, von Ehrenmorden in Amsterdam und Berlin, hätte kein Mensch Angst vor dem Islam und den Muslimen.

Ich bin grade vom Stuhl gefallen vor Lachen beim Lesen des letzten SPON Artikels des herzigen Herrn Broder. Kann bitte jemand dem Herrn Broder ein Buch kaufen oder ihm einen Büchereiausweis besorgen? Bitte. Bildung ist ein Menschenrecht . Man sollte sie Broder nicht vorenthalten. Man muß nicht einmal die einschlägige Studie des Runnymede trust lesen oder Edward Saids frühes Werk (bis und inklusive Orientalism). Es reicht schon, einmal über den oben zitierten Text nachzudenken. Wenn man dann darauf kommt, welche Prämissen in ihn eingingen und wieso deshalb manche Schlüsse, die Herr Broder zieht, nur so dauerhaft sind wie diese fragwürdigen Prämissen (die er in anderen Bereichen selbst nicht annimmt übrigens), dann wäre man schon weiter.

Ps. Der watchblog islamophobie hat sich auch zum von Herrn Broder in offensichtlich angetrunkenem Zustand kommentierten Abend geäußert:

Für die “Problemdastellung” waren Frau Illner und Frau Ates (mit Gastauftritt von Mina Ahadi) zuständig, doch die anderen Diskutanten redeten konstruktiv miteinander.

Erstmal hiess die Sendung: unser Vorurteil, ihr Glaube. – Passt der Islam nach Deutschland.

Es war alles sehr freundlich, verständnisvoll, dialogorientiert

Oh! Oh! Sarko, c’est rigolo!

The President of France, Sarkozy, who supports the highly problematic idea of DNA tests for immigrants, (which, granted, isn’t racist per se, this is dependent on the exact phrasing)has once more shown his colors. Among many other things he said today in a speech in Dakar two frankly outrageous thing, which should lead to his having to resign, but most likely won’t have any effect like that. Bernard, in a piece for the online edition of le monde, highlights them:

Fidèle à lui-même, le président a absous les colonisateurs qui, certes, “ont pillé des ressources” et “ont eu tort” de le faire, mais étaient “sincères”.

le président a présenté l’Africain comme un homme prisonnier de sa culture, marqué par l’irrationalité et l’incapacité d’envisager le futur. “Le drame de l’Afrique, a-t-il déclaré, c’est que l’homme africain n’est pas assez entré dans l’Histoire (…). Jamais il ne s’élance vers l’avenir (…). Dans cet univers où la nature commande tout (…), il n’y a de place ni pour l’aventure humaine ni pour l’idée de progrès.”

The great thing is that Le Monde has posted the whole speech and it is loads of fun to revel in it. After having first said, through various uses of the sentence “Ils ont eu tort” (they were wrong), that the European colonizers of Africa did wrong in colonizing it and doing it the way they did, he continues to somewhat absolve the colonizing movement of their guilt (if you wonder why I quote so extensively from the speech, Le Monde’s online edition isn’t online for free for longer than a week or so, so this post will still be readable when some of the links become defunct)

Le colonisateur est venu, il a pris, il s’est servi, il a exploité, il a pillé des ressources, des richesses qui ne lui appartenaient pas. Il a dépouillé le colonisé de sa personnalité, de sa liberté, de sa terre, du fruit de son travail.

Il a pris mais je veux dire avec respect qu’il a aussi donné. Il a construit des ponts, des routes, des hôpitaux, des dispensaires, des écoles. Il a rendu fécondes des terres vierges, il a donné sa peine, son travail, son savoir. Je veux le dire ici, tous les colons n’étaient pas des voleurs, tous les colons n’étaient pas des exploiteurs.

Il y avait parmi eux des hommes mauvais mais il y avait aussi des hommes de bonne volonté, des hommes qui croyaient remplir une mission civilisatrice, des hommes qui croyaient faire le bien. Ils se trompaient mais certains étaient sincères. Ils croyaient donner la liberté, ils créaient l’aliénation. Ils croyaient briser les chaînes de l’obscurantisme, de la superstition, de la servitude. Ils forgeaient des chaînes bien plus lourdes, ils imposaient une servitude plus pesante, car c’étaient les esprits, c’étaient les âmes qui étaient asservis. Ils croyaient donner l’amour sans voir qu’ils semaient la révolte et la haine.

La colonisation n’est pas responsable de toutes les difficultés actuelles de l’Afrique. Elle n’est pas responsable des guerres sanglantes que se font les Africains entre eux. Elle n’est pas responsable des génocides. Elle n’est pas responsable des dictateurs. Elle n’est pas responsable du fanatisme. Elle n’est pas responsable de la corruption, de la prévarication. Elle n’est pas responsable des gaspillages et de la pollution.

I cannot possibly comment on that without writing at least 20 pages of rebuttal, but this part of his speech is so blatantly ignorant, that it provides its own commentary, basically, doesn’t it? With texts like these, quoting them is more than enough to expose their authors. The other scrumptious parts I let Bernard quote, and apart from these passages, the speech basically becomes a plea for “young africans” to stay at home (don’t come to us) and rebuild their…er…country? Yes, it’s ONE country, Africa, didn’t you know that. Oh God. One might think of pushing books by Paul Gilroy (see also my blog entry on Gilroy here) for this on Sarkozy, and Frantz Fanon as well, who would come in handy in many other places in his fun speech. Even a text that doesn’t carry as much philosophical weight as it used to like Said’s Orientalism (still a very readable book) would broaden this president’s horizons, one feels. As an aside, doesn’t he remind you of Giuliany a lot as well? Strange.
Whatever. Finally, he wraps his speech up by telling the “young africans” that they can change their country all by themselves, with a little help by their French friends. The gall! I’ll quote a good portion of it:

Jeunes d’Afrique, vous voulez le développement, vous voulez la croissance, vous voulez la hausse du niveau de vie.

Mais le voulez-vous vraiment ? Voulez-vous que cessent l’arbitraire, la corruption, la violence ? Voulez-vous que la propriété soit respectée, que l’argent soit investi au lieu d’être détourné ? Voulez-vous que l’État se remette à faire son métier, qu’il soit allégé des bureaucraties qui l’étouffent, qu’il soit libéré du parasitisme, du clientélisme, que son autorité soit restaurée, qu’il domine les féodalités, qu’il domine les corporatismes ? Voulez-vous que partout règne l’État de droit qui permet à chacun de savoir raisonnablement ce qu’il peut attendre des autres ?

Si vous le voulez, alors la France sera à vos côtés pour l’exiger, mais personne ne le voudra à votre place.

Voulez-vous qu’il n’y ait plus de famine sur la terre africaine ? Voulez-vous que, sur la terre africaine, il n’y ait plus jamais un seul enfant qui meure de faim ? Alors cherchez l’autosuffisance alimentaire. Alors développez les cultures vivrières. L’Afrique a d’abord besoin de produire pour se nourrir. Si c’est ce que vous voulez, jeunes d’Afrique, vous tenez entre vos mains l’avenir de l’Afrique, et la France travaillera avec vous pour bâtir cet avenir.

Vous voulez lutter contre la pollution ? Vous voulez que le développement soit durable ? Vous voulez que les générations actuelles ne vivent plus au détriment des générations futures ? Vous voulez que chacun paye le véritable coût de ce qu’il consomme ? Vous voulez développer les technologies propres ? C’est à vous de le décider. Mais si vous le décidez, la France sera à vos côtés.

Vous voulez la paix sur le continent africain ? Vous voulez la sécurité collective ? Vous voulez le règlement pacifique des conflits ? Vous voulez mettre fin au cycle infernal de la vengeance et de la haine ? C’est à vous, mes amis africains, de le décider . Et si vous le décidez, la France sera à vos côtés, comme une amie indéfectible, mais la France ne peut pas vouloir à la place de la jeunesse d’Afrique.

Some days ago, Sarko visited the US and had an enormous success, according to an assessment in the NYTimes

“It’s safe to say that you’ve impressed a lot of people here on your journey,” Mr. Bush said, calling Mr. Sarkozy “the kind of fellow I like to deal with.”

Really telling was this remark, which should have prevented us (well, me) to be surprised by Sarko’s disastrous speech in Dakar today

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said of Mr. Sarkozy’s performance: “You just heard a Ronald Reagan speech from a president of France. It was an almost out-of-body experience for all of us.”

[…]

In his speech and the news conference with Mr. Bush, Mr. Sarkozy pledged to be a strong partner with the United States against terrorism and to keep French troops in Afghanistan as long as needed in the NATO-led mission to bring stability.

Not connecting with the Orient?

Hey, maybe it’s my extensive study of Orientalism four months past but does this statement by Marc Foster, the director of the film adaptation of The Kite Runner, in a recent NY Times article, strike anybody else as odd?

The film’s director, Marc Forster, whose credits include “Finding Neverland” (2004), another film starring child actors, said he saw “The Kite Runner” as “giving a voice and a face to people who’ve been voiceless and faceless for the last 30 years.” Striving for authenticity, he said, he chose to make the film in Dari, an Afghan language, and his casting agent, Kate Dowd, held open calls in cities with sizable Afghan communities, including Fremont, Calif., Toronto and The Hague. But to no avail: Mr. Forster said he “just wasn’t connecting with anybody.”

He’s kinda providing his own commentary, isn’t he? I need to read Orientalism again, methinks.