OR Numerous instances of twins offending the gods in African culture
I went a different way with this blog post (it is a free-for-all, after all) and decided to do a bit of a research project involving a cultural phenominon I rediscovered while reading Things Fall Apart. The issue where the Igbo people put newborn twins in baskets and leave them to die bothers me. I have heard mulitple instances in African cultures where twins are hated and treated in this manner, and I wanted to see why this happens.
I read The Poisonwood Bible in 2005 and thought it was a terrific book about Africa. It examines many of the same subjects we have been discussing in class (PoCo, the other, etc.) and was probably my introduction to thinking about African culture and what Europeans have done to affect it.
Also, I was lucky enough to travel to Madagascar a little less than a year ago, where I visited a friend of mine who lives there working for an landscaping company that specializes in biodiversity planting to prevent erosion. He has been there for over four years, so he speaks the language and could tell me a lot about the culture. I experienced a lot in my short three week stay, discovering many differences between Gasy (short for Malagasy, which is the descriptive term for someone or something from Madagascar) and American culture, as well as many more similarities. I basically discovered that the people of Madagascar are really just like Americans, the only differences lay in cultural quirks. For instance, the kids in Madagascar revere pro wrestling, and John Cena in particular. Also, the most requested songs on the radio are 80's hair band power ballads, like this song.
Then we read Things Fall Apart, and of course, many of the same issues I discovered in Poisonwood Bible and experienced in Madagascar were reiterated and peaked my interest. One of these strange cultural quirks that kept reoccurring was the fear of twins. As we read in Things Fall Apart, newborn twins are abandoned in the forest because they are believed to attract evil spirits and offend the Earth goddess. Similarly, in Poisonwood Bible, twins of the villagers are immediately killed, and the villagers also fear the two twin missionary daughters. Finally, in Madagascar, I learned that American volunteers and the Malagasy government are working hard to fight the local superstition that twins are "fady" or offensive to the gods.
"Fady" is a pretty broad term in Madagascar, meaning anything from "please" to "sorry" to "excuse me" to "taboo" to "leave me alone" etc. Literally translated, it means taboo, but I think a better description is "offensive to the gods". Wearing a hat in a cave, for instance, is fady, because the spirits who live in the cave demand respect. To bear twins is fady, and often the twins are separated, abandoned, or given up for adoption. This goes right along with how twins are treated in The Poisonwood Bible and Things Fall Apart, but it is pretty disturbing to me. I felt compelled to do some research on the place of twins in African culture and see if most of the continent had this reaction to multiple births.
I discovered that most cultures in Africa honor and respect twins. This is more of what I expected, since children are, in my experience, universally venerated and loved. You would think that having multiple children would be viewed as blessing, especially in farming cultures where more labor is needed. I was somewhat relieved that twins weren't hated all across the continent, but I still wanted to look in to possible explanations as to why twins were feared in the Igbo, Congo, and Malagasy cultures.
Apparently, the occurrence of multiple births is high in West Africa. According to one study, the occurrence of fraternal twins is three times higher in West Africa than it is in most of the rest of the world. One explanation is yams, another is genes, but either way it is definitely higher. It's amazing to me that two cultures in West Africa saw this same issue so differently: The Igbo (Okonkwo's people) killed their twins, while the Yoruba saw them as a blessing. This article examines the differences between how these two cultures with regards to the twin question, and poses a possible explanation: that multiple births are for animals, making twins inhuman.
It is so incredible to try to see how different cultures evolve solutions or explanations to natural phenomena. Some cultures venerate the same things that other cultures disparage. It makes you realize that we all have to take a step back and think about cultural differences before we judge a custom as primitive or inferior.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Why Academics Should Continue Reading Heart of Darkness
OR: English professors can't have been terribly wrong for the last century, right?
My argument for in support of the professors who have taught and continue to teach Heart of Darkness is simple: Heart of Darkness should certainly be taught in colleges across the world because it is an incredibly dense work of fiction.
In my previous blog, I basically agreed with Chinua Achebe that Heart of Darkness is a racist text. Achebe makes numerous valid points explaining this, and I made a couple similar, less adequate references in support of the same. But while Achebe goes so far as to say Joseph Conrad was a racist and that it is an abomination that we teach his text , I say that the work itself is great enough that we can learn from it despite the contextual shortcomings of its author. I will concede that Heart of Darkness is racist. So is Shakespeare’s Othello. But like Othello, Conrad’s work is dripping with complexity: it can be studied as a literary work, as a psychological work, as a sociological work, as a historical work, as a political work, etc. You can see that complexity simply by looking at the different titles of the essays in our anthology. We, as readers, have to put the work’s racism in context and be able to draw pertinent conclusions from it in spite of its primitive views about race. I look at it this way: in 200 years, when the entire civilized world is vegetarian, are future students going to be barred from reading works by every barbarian who ate meat? I sure hope not, and I don’t think that will be the case.
Achebe argues that we must eradicate this text (and presumably all racist texts) from the Western Literary Canon (volume 59) because the only way the West will stop taking advantage of other races is through “abandonment of unwholesome thoughts” (348). I argue that cutting great, complex works out of our curriculum doesn’t help us remove our unwholesome thoughts. In fact, I believe that education is the driving factor in learning from our unwholesome thoughts and moving past them.
In short, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that minds across the globe can benefit a great deal from analyzing Heart of Darkness . Hopefully, academia has moved past looking at the work as a literal description of black people. Hopefully, academia has learned to contextualize a work when it is studied. Hopefully, academia is skilled enough at analyzing a complex work that it can look through the ugliness it presents and formulate new thoughts about the present and the past.
I think the biggest flaw in Achebe’s essay comes at the conclusion, wherein he decides against ending on a positive note:
“In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people….But… I realized no easy optimism was possible” (348).
His pessimism was the downfall of his essay. Just like the West needs to have more faith in Africans’ concept for humanity, Achebe needs to have more faith in the West’s.
(NOTE: Here’s a link to the definition of literary canon. I think it’s a very useful term for literature connoisseurs to know. Plus I sat for about ten minutes trying to remember the term and typing things like “what is the term for a group of literary works that is commonly taught in college courses” into Google before I finally remembered it. I’m trying to prevent you from doing the same.)
My argument for in support of the professors who have taught and continue to teach Heart of Darkness is simple: Heart of Darkness should certainly be taught in colleges across the world because it is an incredibly dense work of fiction.
In my previous blog, I basically agreed with Chinua Achebe that Heart of Darkness is a racist text. Achebe makes numerous valid points explaining this, and I made a couple similar, less adequate references in support of the same. But while Achebe goes so far as to say Joseph Conrad was a racist and that it is an abomination that we teach his text , I say that the work itself is great enough that we can learn from it despite the contextual shortcomings of its author. I will concede that Heart of Darkness is racist. So is Shakespeare’s Othello. But like Othello, Conrad’s work is dripping with complexity: it can be studied as a literary work, as a psychological work, as a sociological work, as a historical work, as a political work, etc. You can see that complexity simply by looking at the different titles of the essays in our anthology. We, as readers, have to put the work’s racism in context and be able to draw pertinent conclusions from it in spite of its primitive views about race. I look at it this way: in 200 years, when the entire civilized world is vegetarian, are future students going to be barred from reading works by every barbarian who ate meat? I sure hope not, and I don’t think that will be the case.
Achebe argues that we must eradicate this text (and presumably all racist texts) from the Western Literary Canon (volume 59) because the only way the West will stop taking advantage of other races is through “abandonment of unwholesome thoughts” (348). I argue that cutting great, complex works out of our curriculum doesn’t help us remove our unwholesome thoughts. In fact, I believe that education is the driving factor in learning from our unwholesome thoughts and moving past them.
In short, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that minds across the globe can benefit a great deal from analyzing Heart of Darkness . Hopefully, academia has moved past looking at the work as a literal description of black people. Hopefully, academia has learned to contextualize a work when it is studied. Hopefully, academia is skilled enough at analyzing a complex work that it can look through the ugliness it presents and formulate new thoughts about the present and the past.
I think the biggest flaw in Achebe’s essay comes at the conclusion, wherein he decides against ending on a positive note:
“In my original conception of this essay I had thought to conclude it nicely on an appropriately positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged position in African and Western cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa once it rid its mind of old prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of distortions and cheap mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people….But… I realized no easy optimism was possible” (348).
His pessimism was the downfall of his essay. Just like the West needs to have more faith in Africans’ concept for humanity, Achebe needs to have more faith in the West’s.
(NOTE: Here’s a link to the definition of literary canon. I think it’s a very useful term for literature connoisseurs to know. Plus I sat for about ten minutes trying to remember the term and typing things like “what is the term for a group of literary works that is commonly taught in college courses” into Google before I finally remembered it. I’m trying to prevent you from doing the same.)
Friday, September 4, 2009
Marlow's "Level" of Racism
OR Weak, Medium, and Strong Racism in Heart of Darkness
Peter Edgerly Firchow's essay Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, Empire postulates that there are three levels of racism: weak racism, medium racisim, and strong racism. Weak racisim, according to Firchow, is "the belief that races (however defined, including ethnic and national groups) do exist and that they help to account for social phenomina." (p. 238) Medium racism, summarized, is the belief that some races are superior. Strong racism is the belief that the superior races are entitled to supress or eliminate the inferior races. (238)
Firchow goes on to argue that Marlow's attitude toward the Africans in Heart of Darkness is no more than weakly racist. Firchow states that "it does, however, imply a temporary cultural superiority."(238) I am going to look at evidence in the text to see if Marlow is indeed only lightly racist towards the Africans.
One instance where I can see Marlow's attitude as only a "temporary cultural superiority" is in his assertion that Britain was once as wild as Africa. "Imagine him [a Roman officer] here [Britain] - at the end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, [....] Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink." (6). Here, Marlow does his best to compare Britain to Africa, and even states that the primitive Englishman was a savage. What is unclear to me, however, is Marlow's ideas about the modern (to him, in 1899) English race as opposed to the primitive English race under Roman rule. Does he consider the modern English to be the same race as the primitive English? Or have generations of Roman, Saxon, and Germanic blood, which entered the Anglo race throughout the centuries after the Romans first set foot on Britain, evolved the race into something different, something superior? I am not comfortable projecting a mindset into Marlow's character, but I am aware that one school of thought at the time was that the Anglo-Saxon race was a superior due to it's mix of the best qualities of Europeans, and it was "manifest destiny" that the Anglo-Saxon absorb all other races (this book). Did Marlow think this?
I have a tendency to think that Marlow is more of a "medium racist". I combed the work looking for instances of humanity, or even relatability between Marlow and the African characters. The closest I see is in instances where African people are suffering. "They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals [....] Then glancing down I saw a face near my hand. [...] slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs which died out slowly."(17) He goes on to describe trying to give the sick, dying boy a piece of bread, but the boy is too weak to take it. I particularly think the closest instance to relating to the natives is when a man on his boat get stabbed with a spear and Marlow watches him die: "We two whites stood over him and his lustrous and inquiringglance enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would presently put to us some question in an understandable language, but he died without uttering a sound..." (46). I, however, think that these feelings of mercy are no more profound than when a man sees a dying or suffering animal. His feeding of the sick boy reminds me of feeding a stray dog. Marlow's reaction to the suffering, dying man with a spear in his side reminds me of a man who kills his first deer.
Ultimately, I believe that Marlow is a medium racist character. I think there is too much use of terms like "improved specimen" (36) "creatures" (17) and "fool-nigger" (45) for me to conclude that Marlow feels no superiority towards the Africans. And while he goes on for a paragraph or two about relating to an uneducated white ship mechanic, (29-30) I struggle to find an instance where Marlow socializes with a single African. His communication with them consists of barking orders, and his descriptions of them are always physical instead of mental or emotional. While Marlow does condemn the treatment of Africans in the story, I think that simply marks the borderline between "medium racism" and "strong racism", not "light racism" and "medium racism".
Peter Edgerly Firchow's essay Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, Empire postulates that there are three levels of racism: weak racism, medium racisim, and strong racism. Weak racisim, according to Firchow, is "the belief that races (however defined, including ethnic and national groups) do exist and that they help to account for social phenomina." (p. 238) Medium racism, summarized, is the belief that some races are superior. Strong racism is the belief that the superior races are entitled to supress or eliminate the inferior races. (238)
Firchow goes on to argue that Marlow's attitude toward the Africans in Heart of Darkness is no more than weakly racist. Firchow states that "it does, however, imply a temporary cultural superiority."(238) I am going to look at evidence in the text to see if Marlow is indeed only lightly racist towards the Africans.
One instance where I can see Marlow's attitude as only a "temporary cultural superiority" is in his assertion that Britain was once as wild as Africa. "Imagine him [a Roman officer] here [Britain] - at the end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, [....] Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink." (6). Here, Marlow does his best to compare Britain to Africa, and even states that the primitive Englishman was a savage. What is unclear to me, however, is Marlow's ideas about the modern (to him, in 1899) English race as opposed to the primitive English race under Roman rule. Does he consider the modern English to be the same race as the primitive English? Or have generations of Roman, Saxon, and Germanic blood, which entered the Anglo race throughout the centuries after the Romans first set foot on Britain, evolved the race into something different, something superior? I am not comfortable projecting a mindset into Marlow's character, but I am aware that one school of thought at the time was that the Anglo-Saxon race was a superior due to it's mix of the best qualities of Europeans, and it was "manifest destiny" that the Anglo-Saxon absorb all other races (this book). Did Marlow think this?
I have a tendency to think that Marlow is more of a "medium racist". I combed the work looking for instances of humanity, or even relatability between Marlow and the African characters. The closest I see is in instances where African people are suffering. "They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals [....] Then glancing down I saw a face near my hand. [...] slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs which died out slowly."(17) He goes on to describe trying to give the sick, dying boy a piece of bread, but the boy is too weak to take it. I particularly think the closest instance to relating to the natives is when a man on his boat get stabbed with a spear and Marlow watches him die: "We two whites stood over him and his lustrous and inquiringglance enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would presently put to us some question in an understandable language, but he died without uttering a sound..." (46). I, however, think that these feelings of mercy are no more profound than when a man sees a dying or suffering animal. His feeding of the sick boy reminds me of feeding a stray dog. Marlow's reaction to the suffering, dying man with a spear in his side reminds me of a man who kills his first deer.
Ultimately, I believe that Marlow is a medium racist character. I think there is too much use of terms like "improved specimen" (36) "creatures" (17) and "fool-nigger" (45) for me to conclude that Marlow feels no superiority towards the Africans. And while he goes on for a paragraph or two about relating to an uneducated white ship mechanic, (29-30) I struggle to find an instance where Marlow socializes with a single African. His communication with them consists of barking orders, and his descriptions of them are always physical instead of mental or emotional. While Marlow does condemn the treatment of Africans in the story, I think that simply marks the borderline between "medium racism" and "strong racism", not "light racism" and "medium racism".
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now
This has been written about in college courses ad naseum, but Francis Ford Coppola does some really cool things with Heart of Darkness in his Vietnam film adaptation Apocalypse Now. If you have some spare time, compare this scene with the paragraph starting at the bottom of page 44 and ending at the bottom of page 45:
(Sorry about the Italian subtitles. Also there's some strong language.)
And I love Marlon Brando's portrayal of Kurtz. Compare this scene with the two paragraphs at the bottom of page 61 through the top of page 62, starting with "At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice..." (Keep in mind that the manager and Marlow are combined into Martin Sheen's character of Willard):
(Again, strong language)
Coppola does some fantastic things with lighting and music to set the mood for both of these scenes, really capturing the fear and intrigue of Africa/Veitnam and Kurtz. If you get a chance to watch Apocalypse Now sometime soon, I highly recommend it, and if you watch it, make sure you get the "redux" version. Seeing the film and reading the story in a short time span will do a lot to enhance both experiences. There is also a documentary about making Apocalypse Now called Hearts of Darkness: a Filmmaker's Apocalypse which is also insanely interesting, but not as pertinent to this class.
(Sorry about the Italian subtitles. Also there's some strong language.)
And I love Marlon Brando's portrayal of Kurtz. Compare this scene with the two paragraphs at the bottom of page 61 through the top of page 62, starting with "At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice..." (Keep in mind that the manager and Marlow are combined into Martin Sheen's character of Willard):
(Again, strong language)
Coppola does some fantastic things with lighting and music to set the mood for both of these scenes, really capturing the fear and intrigue of Africa/Veitnam and Kurtz. If you get a chance to watch Apocalypse Now sometime soon, I highly recommend it, and if you watch it, make sure you get the "redux" version. Seeing the film and reading the story in a short time span will do a lot to enhance both experiences. There is also a documentary about making Apocalypse Now called Hearts of Darkness: a Filmmaker's Apocalypse which is also insanely interesting, but not as pertinent to this class.
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