Okay. Here's the deal. I'm not particularly funny. I'm not particularly profound. At least not when I try too hard. But I do like to read. A lot of books. And I want to find people who want to talk about them.
Up this week: Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen. Her prose is lovely, full of light.
Like this: "I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gradeculness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a fmaily of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing."
Or this: "All the deerhounds were great hunters and had more nose than the greyhounds, but they hunted by sight and it was a highly wonderful thing to see two of them working together. I took them with me when I was out riding in the Game Reserve, which I was not allowed to do, and there they would spread the herds of zebra and wildebeest over the plain, as if it were all the stars of heaven running wild over the sky."
And I think we will not fulfill the rule of three today.
But what do you think? Is it possible to enjoy language like this without embroiling oneself in a white man's colonialist nightmare?
7 comments:
Maybe if you're a giraffe. But, generally, I would say no. Not that one should feel guilty every time you feel pleasure when you're seduced by something beautiful. That just fits too well into the American Protestant history of the guilt trip. Reading list: Fredric Jameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue"; Wendy Brown, "Moralism as Anti-Politics"; James Morone, _Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History_.
sorry, that comment was a bit pedantic.
Glad I can always count on you :)
living in america, we can't escape that guilt complex. i don't know - we read king solomon's mines, right? but it was uncomfortable, even while being blatantly ridiculous and therefore funny.
colonialism, if it extends only to a view of the scenery, is ok i think in fiction. it's when you get into the people that things get itchy.
but what if it was written in the present day as a pastiche of what people felt back then? would it then be ok, an interesting novelistic (?) exercise?
“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” - Walter Benjamin
the funny thing, too, is that Karen Blixen, who wrote the book, actually had a much more egalitarian view of the Africans she worked with (or, who, more realistically, worked for her) than most of the other colonists. She does strongly romanticize her experience in Africa (no wonder; she longed to go back all her life), but she really does think of the Africans as people, whereas I'm not so sure most of the other colonists did. Just recently there have been stories here about a White Kenyan (son of lord so-and-so or whatever), shooting at will black Africans on his land, claiming they were poachers. He got away with it the first time, but not the second, I think. Anyway, although Blixen tends to think of the people she knew in racial terms (Somalis are like this; Kikiyu are like this; Masai are like this), that doesn't stop her from seeing them as people with desires and fears and questions and abilities.
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