Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee - 2

(Continued from the post above)

In an interesting analysis of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children from a postcolonial perspective, Cathy C. Miller (Salman Rushdie’s ‘Stereoscopic Vision:’ Postcolonial Environments in Midnight’s Children) says, 

“In his literature, Rushdie grapples with this issue (of authentic representation of national culture) and resists being pigeonholed to one particular culture.  He refers to authenticity as “the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism”  which  “demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition” (Imaginary  67). 

“Rushdie insists that his purpose is not to create “authentic” Indian literature but validates his position as a postcolonial writer by stressing the valuable qualities of having two countries to draw from.  Growing up in a country that was greatly influenced by British rule, attending British schools, and migrating to England in his midtwenties inevitably westernized Rushdie’s perspective.  But instead of viewing this “double identity” as a negative spiral into the clutches of Western colonialism, Rushdie uses it to his benefit as a form of decolonization – quite possibly he is able to see the pitfalls of Fanon’s national consciousness and culture. 

“This double perspective gives him “stereoscopic vision” which allows him to simultaneously look at two societies from both the inside and the outside.  Rushdie states that postcolonial Indian writers who have migrated away from India “are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society.  This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’” (Imaginary 19).  Because of their multiple backgrounds and experiences, writers in Rushdie’s position are able to recreate reality in a way that is directly related to their postcolonial identities. These plural identities provide them with various angles to analyze and [re]create reality within their fictions.”

(passage taken from: http://rhetoric.sdsu.edu/lore/6_1/9.0_miller.pdf)

Edward Said’s analysis of Kipling’s Kim (in  ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’ Culture and Imperialism) is masterly.

Ruydard Kipling

“The conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict; one purpose of the novel is in fact to show the absence of conflict once Kim is cured of his doubts, the lama of his longing for the River, and India of a few upstairs and foreign agents. That there might have been a conflict had Kipling considered India as unhappily subservient to imperialism, we can have no doubt, but he did not; for him it was India’s best destiny to be ruled by England. By an equal and opposite reductiveness, if one reads Kipling not simply as an “imperialist minstrel” (which he was not) but as someone who read Frantz Fanon, met Gandhi, absorbed their lessons, and remained stubbornly unconvinced by them, one seriously distorts his context, which he refines, elaborates, and illuminates. It is crucial to remember that there were no appreciable deterrents to the imperialists world-view Kipling held, any more than there were alternatives to imperialism for Conrad, however much he recognized its evils. Kipling was therefore untroubled by the notion of an independent India, although it is true to say that his fiction (as opposed to discursive prose) incur ironies and problems of the kind encountered in Austen or Verdi and, we shall soon see, in Camus. My point is this contrapuntal reading is to emphasize and highlight the disjunctions, not to overlook or play them down.”

The Kite Runner

By far, one of the most pleasant offshoots of my life in Toronto has been getting reacquainted with reading fiction. The last I did that with some degree of seriousness was in the 1980s. Thanks to my friends at The Village Terraces, I now have an almost unlimited supply of fiction – both old and new.

I recently read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. It's a simple story of a man’s journey from boyhood to manhood, made interesting because the protagonist is from Afghanistan. It is a sentimental tale, compelling told.

One of the most interesting critiques of Hosseini’s novel is by Matthew Thomas Miller, a graduate student in Islamic and Near Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Writing on the film made in 2007 Miller ('The Kite Runner' Critiqued: New Orientalism Goes to the Big Screen) argues: “This adventurous and engrossing story neatly functions as an allegorized version of the colonial/neo-colonial/imperial imperative of "intervening" in "dark" countries in order to save the sub-human Others who would be otherwise simply lost in their own ignorance and brutality. These magnanimous interventions, of course, have nothing to do with economic or geopolitical concerns; they are purely self-sacrificial expressions of the superiority of the imperial peoples' humanity and ideology.”

Miller’s contention is a continuation of the idea developed by US-based Iranian writer Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karmustafa, also the professor of Persian Language and Comparative Literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. (I guess Miller must be her student).

In her book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karmustafa notes that books such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul have come to represent a new trend which she categorizes as the New Orientalist narrative.

Edward Said’s Orientalism laid the foundations of alternative worldview that contended that the Western world’s (England, France in the 19th century and the US in the 20th century) understanding of the Orient remains clouded by a deep-seated mindset that views “European cultures as the norm and those that are different as an aberration. Its main proponents were 18th and 19th century European philologists who viewed the Orientals as great in the past and devoid of agency, self-awareness, and critical ability at present.”

Said explained that most scholarly works about the non-Western regions of the world were done from a colonial perspective, and followed a four-stage process by the conquering colonialist: expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification

In an interview Foaad Khosmood (on http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/14811), Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karmustafa contends that this New Orientalism as illustrated by most of the new writing from the Middle East "reduces the contemporary Muslim Middle East to an uncomplicated black and white world of villains (usually Muslims) and victims (usually sympathizers with the west). A vast number of people and events, that don't fit either category, are simply left out of the picture."

From this perspective, Hosseini’s story of Amir and his brave efforts to rescue his friend’s son from the clutches of the Taliban is simplistic rather than simple.

As Miller’s scathing review observes: “The profound guilt that Amir suffers from his inaction during the violation of his innocent friend Hassan seems to represent the collective guilt of all "good" western or western-oriented people who watched idly while the Islamic bullies-epitomized by Assef-violated Afghanistan and the innocent western-oriented people like Baba and Amir. Of course, the implication then is that we also must redeem ourselves by returning and "rescuing" the people there from the Assefs of Afghanistan-this is our "way to be good again," in the words Khaled Hosseini's character Rahim Khan.

"This new recapitulation of the old "white man's [now, western] burden" narrative, when combined with the "Westernization of Goodness" and "Islamization of Evil" clearly present throughout the novel, provides a superb ideological framework upon which to justify our present occupation and future military interventions in Afghanistan.”