What is Orientalism?

Orientalism is an important concept to keep in mind as we start EN 202 because the West's political & cultural power makes it easy to see non-Western literature as exotic and less important than Western literature.  Since this semester we are reading Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters from the Ottoman Empire *and* excerpts from Evliya Celebi's The Book of Travels, this concept is especially important since Edward Said's book focuses on this part of the world more than it focuses on Africa.  So I thought I would put up some links about it while I have a little more time. 

Nowadays when we talk about Orientalism in literary studies we are referring to Edward Said's definition of this term: Orientalism as a method of defining the Middle East (and the rest of Asia) as an object of study by Westerners.  However, as Danielle Sered notes in a web page on Orientalism, this term was used long before Said.  Then its meaning was a lot less controversial.

 http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html

Prof. Allen Carey-Webb's page at the University of Western Michigan provides more detailed information about the concept of Orientalism, the reception of Said's ideas, and Said himself.

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/orientalism.htm

Interestingly, his students have also written about some of the works that we'll be reading.  Here is Michael Omo's page on Heart of Darkness: 

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/heartofdarkness.html

Theresa Johnson wrote about Things Fall Apart:

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/thingsfallapart.html

OK, I'm starting to go off track, but here is Vicki L. Whisler's page on Oroonoko:

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/oroonoko.html

Said does mention Heart of Darkness and other works by Conrad, but his emphasis is on the Middle East as it has been scrutinized and defined by Westerners.  Nevertheless, because Said has helped us realize how politicized literature and literary studies are and his book is a key text in post-colonial studies, he has affected how we read Heart of Darkness et al.  We cannot read it as naively as we might have before Said published Orientalism (1978). 

Of course, neither should we read Orientalism naively.  FYI, here are some reviews by critics of Said:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/enough-said-3743

The print on this article is small, but this site is more accessible than Salon is nowadays:

http://www.ictal.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1328

 

How do you interpret the way that the authors of these web sites use the term Orientalist or Oriental?

http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/

http://www.orientalistart.net/index.html

http://www.arabartgallery.com/orient1.htm

Here is a painting by Kamil Aslanger, a contemporary Turkish artist who calls himself an Orientalist artist.  I tried to go to his website, but it is entirely in Turkish!  It looks and sounds beautiful, though.

Reading Heart of Darkness (Historical Background)

This evening I'd like to put together a quick entry on the history of and current events in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo and the setting of Heart of Darkness).  I've posted a current map from Lonely Planet above; here is a historical map from the 19th century.  (Conrad worked in the Congo around 1890.)  I was able to find a map from around that time!  It is a little oversize, but look for the "Congo Free State."

 

More importantly, here are some links about the history of the DR Congo.

The US State Department's site is very comprehensive.  Scroll down the page to find historical information that predates the arrival of Europeans.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2823.htm

On the other hand, the BBC's historical background is more readable:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1120825.stm

Historian John Henrik Clarke has written this article about the history of the Congo *before* colonialization:

http://www.africawithin.com/clarke/LumumbaCongo.html

The University of Pennsylvania's African Studies Center brings together a number of disparate but relevant sites on the DR Congo:

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Country_Specific/Zaire.html

For a change of pace, here is Lonely Planet's information about the DR Congo:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/democratic-republic-of-congo

Here is a picture of Kinshasa, the nation's largest city.

This picture of a village is also from the BBC:

 

As is this collage of scenes from the recent elections:

I do want to include some more detailed historical background about Belgium's occupation or colonization of what is now the DR Congo.  The first article is from Yale's Genocide Studies Program:

http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/belgian_congo/index.html

Here are history professor Wallace Mills' notes on this topic:

http://husky1.stmarys.ca/~wmills/course317/5Belgian_Policies.html

CNN's website from 1997 provides useful information about what happened after the DR Congo (then Zaire) became independent in 1960.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9704/02/zaire.essay/

Howard W. French's 1997 article from the NY Times focuses on Mobutu Seso Seke, Zaire's dictator from 1965 to 1997:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E6D61338F934A25756C0A961958260

A Wikipedia entry on Mobutu is more blunt, stating that "his name [was] synonymous with kleptocracy [rule by theft] in Africa" (par. 1).

This BBC profile is about the DR Congo's next ruler, Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1121068.stm

Currently, his son Joseph is the president, having won the election in 2006.

Here are some more recent articles about the country and its current situation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7824870.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7850086.stm

How might your knowledge of history and current events affect your understanding of Heart of Darkness -- and Achebe's criticism of this work?

 

 

 

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, and Home & Exile (part 3)

Chinua Achebe's Home and Exile (2000) is certainly life writing, but it fits into a separate category from the ones I mentioned in class today.  His book is made up of three essays that began as lectures at Harvard.  These essays touch on not only his life but also his opinions about literature.  One cannot call these essays "simply" memoirs.

The first essay, "My Home Under Imperial Fire," begins in a way that makes the reader believe that he or she is about to read a traditional memoir.  Achebe recalls his entry into his home village, Ogidi, the home that his father, a missionary, had chosen to retire to.  Ironically, as Achebe later observes, the relative who had been watching the family home for Achebe's father still worshipped the village gods.  In fact, the relative built a shrine in the home that the former missionary had planned to retire to.  Achebe's father destroyed the shrine; however, overall, in his recollections of his home village, Achebe emphasizes the persistence of Igbo values and culture.  He underscores their influence on his own life and work.

 

 

[The first picture above is from a Catholic newspaper in Sacramento, CA.  The girls in the procession are part of an Igbo parish there.  The second picture above is from the library at Southern Illinois University and depicts a man playing a drum in an Igbo ritual.]

In the next section of "My Home Under Imperial Fire," Achebe moves on to a discussion of European writing about Africa and mid-20th century African literature.  He recalls his classmates' recoiling from Mister Johnson, an Englishman's novel about an African.  (As you can see, the book was later made into a film with Pierce Brosnan.)  Achebe's English professors had thought that the students would be interested in reading a novel set in Nigeria.

 

In the next essay, "The Empire Fights Back," you see that Achebe's criticism of Conrad is part of a cultural context.  It is amazing but not surprising to see the criticism that an early work of African literature, Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), received...from a Englishwoman who wrote a number of works set in Africa...and whose works have appeared on Masterpiece Theater!  Ironically, maybe not so ironically, as Achebe later notes, Nigerian students also complained about Tutuola's novel due to its lack of style and resemblance to a "folk tale."  Achebe then reveals that these students had not read the book!

However, Achebe also mentions authors and reviewers who were sympathetic towards African literature.  One was the poet Dylan Thomas who gave The Palm-Wine Drinkard a glowing review.  Another was F.J. Pedler who encouraged Africans to write about their continent.  

In the last essay, "Today, The Balance of Stories," Achebe contemplates the current state of African and other post-colonialist literature.  He praises writers such as Nadine Gordimer, Ama Ata Aidoo (an author from Ghana), and R.K. Narayan for the clarity of their vision and their willingness to avoid stereotypes.  On the other hand, he criticizes V.S. Naipaul and Buchi Emecheta for their eagerness to assimilate into mainstream British culture.  In particular, Achebe encourages writers to...in a way...cultivate their own garden--to depict what they have seen and experienced rather than to be ashamed of it and strive to write stereotypically. 

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, and Home and Exile (Part 2)

In this entry, I will focus on Things Fall Apart, the novel that we will be reading from after we finish Heart of Darkness. 

By the way, here is an advertisement for the 1987 TV miniseries version of the novel.  I found the image at www.africanmoviesdirect.com.  Here is a link to the You Tube channel where you may watch scenes from this miniseries.  It looks like the screenwriters have made changes!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7FS95IcRNU

Hmmm ....the "irrepressible" Okonkwo. 

As you read Things Fall Apart, how would you describe Okonkwo?  In your opinion, how does the third-person narrator seem to feel about him?

If you've read Ed Pilkington's Guardian article (see part 1), you may know that Achebe originally conceived of Things Fall Apart as a multigenerational novel.  Instead, in his final version, the novel focuses on Okonkwo, a seemingly prosperous and powerful Igbo farmer.  He is not at odds with his society....or is he?  His violent temper concerns the other men in his village, and the novel takes place at the end of the 19th century as the British consolidate their rule over what is now known as Nigeria and Protestant missionaries convert the villagers to Christianity.

Here is a current map of Africa to give you an idea of where Nigeria is.

Below is a close-up map of Nigeria, fyi.

Here is a link to the BBC's profile of Nigeria:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/country_profiles/1064557.stm

This timeline from the BBC will come in handy as well.  As we can see, Things Fall Apart takes place as the British are consolidating their rule.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/country_profiles/1067695.stm

This Wikipedia page contains specific information about the ethnic makeup of Nigeria:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria

Because of the tensions that I mention below, the information is specific but not necessarily accurate.

Here is an article about the tribal tensions that still exist in Nigeria:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/census-stirs-old-rivalries-between-nigerias-tribes-470671.html

In fact, in the 1960s, shortly after the country became independent, members of the Igbo seceded and formed the nation of Biafra.  Civil war broke out, and by 1970, Biafra was rejoined to Nigeria.

I would also like to post information about the Igbo, the ethnicity to which Achebe and the African characters in his novel belong:

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/oldworld/africa/igbo.html

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Igbo.html

http://www.geocities.com/athens/acropolis/3629/igbo.html

http://www.umunne.org/

And here is a link to a page on food in Nigeria!

http://www.foodbycountry.com/Kazakhstan-to-South-Africa/Nigeria.html

This site is by someone from the Yoruba group:

http://motherlandnigeria.com/food.html

I'd also like to post a link to the "virtual village" of Umuofia that I mentioned in part 1:

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~acareywe/umuofia/umuofiateachers.html

Finally, I will close with a few pictures.  First is a picture from Maine!  The curator of an African museum in Portland, Oscar Mokeme is teaching his son how to perform a song from the Igbo tradition.  (My husband and I have been to Mr. Mokeme's museum.)

Below is a picture that tells us what the egwugwu in Things Fall Apart may have looked like.  The picture is from a class site at Augusta State University.

Here is a reconstruction of an Igbo family compound.  It is part of an exhibit at Liverpool's International Slavery Museum.

I wanted to post this picture from www.everyculture.com as well to give you a picture of someone living in the huts. 

 

However, most Nigerians live in the city, so I thought I would end with this picture of a market in Lagos, the former capital.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, and Home and Exile (part 1)

While I am champing at the bit for the semester to begin, I thought that I'd add an entry on the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, his first novel Things Fall Apart, and his 2000 book, Home and Exile, a trio of essays that began as the author's lectures at Harvard.  In fact, I feel a little guilty with all the Conrad entries I've posted so far. 

The first picture above is of Achebe and from the Guardian's blogs.  The second is one of the many editions of Things Fall Apart.  It appears to be an older edition and is from a Chinese web site.  As I've done with  Heart of Darkness, I could probably devote an entire entry to covers of Things Fall Apart.  So much has changed since 1958 when that novel was first published.  In fact, Achebe's homeland, Nigeria, would still be ruled by the British for another two years. 

Also, Multiply is a good place to repost some links that I have up at WebCT.  The first is to Achebe's "An Image of Africa," an essay that began as a lecture given at the University of Massachusetts in 1975:

http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html

In this essay, the author fiercely criticizes Conrad for relying on racist stereotypes of Africa and Africans as well as working to perpetuate these stereotypes in his Heart of Darkness.  Furthermore, Achebe maintains that, for the most part, Conrad refuses to let Africans speak in his novella.  Then, he notes that when they are allowed to, their few words confirm European prejudice.

Indeed, the picture below is an 17th-century engraving of a procession through Benin City, the capital of the Edo kingdom in what is now Nigeria.

Below is a picture of a bronze bowl dating from the ninth or tenth century CE.  (The bowl is from the Igbo, another group or, as Achebe states, "nation," in Nigeria.)

British author Caryl Phillips interviewed Achebe in 2003.  Here, in this article from the Guardian, Achebe expands on his criticism of Conrad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/feb/22/classics.chinuaachebe

More recently, Ed Pilkington interviewed Achebe.  In this article also published in the guardian, the author recalls his original plan for Things Fall Apart.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/10/chinuaachebe

Pilkington's article also gives you a better sense of Achebe's life.  For a more organized outline, see the BBC's biography:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/chinua-achebe.shtml

This website's biography is more detailed and more recent:

http://chinua-achebe.com/index.htm

I know I am going to have to add another entry or two, so I will conclude with some pictures from Nigeria:

First is a picture of Achebe's birthplace, Ogidi:

Below is a picture from an Igbo woman's wedding.  The bride is wearing orange!

 

I am not sure when this picture dates from, but it is from a "virtual village" built to help American students understand Things Fall Apart a little better.

Also, if you go to Staunton, VA, you'll be able to see a replica of an Igbo village:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/05/igbo-village-re-created-for-museum/

Almayer's Folly

I think I know what one of my summer projects will be....to read (and reread) more of Conrad's novels.  This week I read his first novel, Almayer's Folly.  I wish that I had been able to find a picture of one of the covers, but I couldn't find one that was the right size.  The picture above is from the Earth Hope Action Network's site and shows one of the rivers that run through the island of Borneo.  Below is a map as well to show you where it is.

Here is a map of the island itself from Orangutantrop, another conservation site.

I think that I have probably included enough about the setting of Almayer's Folly. 

This novel is the story of Almayer, a Dutchman who has lived all of his life in the colonies.  (He was born in Java, a part of Indonesia, which was then a Dutch colony.)  At the time the story begins, he is a middle-aged merchant whose ambitions have always gone astray.  In fact, he had married his wife in the hope that he would inherit her foster father's considerable wealth.  (He does not.)  He is waiting for a younger man, the son of the sultan from Bali, to return from an expedition.  This expedition, he hopes, will give him enough money to leave Borneo for the Netherlands.  He fantasizes that he and his beautiful daughter, Nina, will enjoy Europe...and that he can leave his wife behind in the colonies.  Dain Maroola, the younger man he is waiting for, on the other hand, has fallen in love with Nina and wants to bring her with him to Bali.  Nina loves him madly, and her mother is more than happy to spoil Almayer's schemes.

Below is a blogger's photograph of a Balinese wedding:

In some ways, Almayer's Folly is a very modern novel, especially if you are used to reading 19th century British novels like Jane Eyre or Pride & Prejudice or David Copperfield.  Almayer has failed at life, and the narrator makes it clear that his neighbors laugh at him, take advantage of him, or both.  His wife, a Filipino, is clearly contemptous of him even as he looks down at her in a passive aggressive way.  Nina is much more sympathetic towards her father, but she has chosen to align herself with her mother, in part because of the way she was treated as a young girl by Europeans.  Nina is also very resilient, and I really like the way that Conrad depicts her as skillfully rowing here and there as she needs to. 

In 2004, there were plans for a film version of Almayer's Folly.  It hasn't made it to imdb.com, but here are some links to stories about this production:

http://www.balifilm.com/almayer.htm

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Saturday/Columns/2454977/index.pda

http://www.lebrocquyfraser.com/index/film.php?id=8&status=4

Apparently it is still in development!

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (part two)

I don't like writing super long Multiply entries, so here is part two of my entry on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad. 

The picture above is of Conrad with his wife and younger son.  I think that it fits John Batchelor's bio nicely since this biographer does a better job of putting Conrad in context than Stape did.  Also, I suspect that Stape might have lost patience with Conrad.  Unsurprisingly, this can be an occupational hazard with biographers, and if one shies away from Conrad's work and hones in on his letters, it is easier to lose patience with him.

Since Stape, however, does a better job of writing about Conrad's earlier life (in Poland, France, and the merchant marines), this entry will focus on his later life as a writer. 

I wonder how an ESL teacher or theorist would look at Conrad's work.  After all, he was writing in a language that he did not learn until he was an adult.  (English was his third or fourth language, perhaps even his fifth.  I suspect that living in an area that Russia occupied, he had to know some Russian.)  An ESL teacher or theorist would shed interesting light on Conrad's struggles with writer's block and his collaboration with native writer Ford Madox Ford during the 1900s. 

Also, of course, a large part of Conrad's life in England was his attempt to establish and sustain an identity.  I imagine that this added to his tension.  Early on, Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa criticized him for writing in English even though he had not lived in Poland since he was a teenager.  Later, English natives such as Lady Ottoline Morrell & Bertrand Russell and would-be natives such as Henry James patronized him as an exotic foreigner.  When Conrad and his agent Pinker were quarrelling in 1909 & 1910, the agent struck back at him by claiming that he did not speak or understand English well enough.  Conrad, of course, responded with a stinging retort.  He also changed agents for a time.  Moreover, when Conrad did go to Poland in 1914, as Batchelor notes, his customary depression and anxiety lifted, only to return once he was in England again. 

Here is a quick outline of some of Conrad's work.  Although Heart of Darkness is perhaps his most celebrated and read work, he wrote many other novels, novellas (short novels), and short stories.  In fact, Marlow (the chief narrator in Heart of Darkness) narrates several other of Conrad's works: Youth, Lord Jim, and a later novel, Chance.  Some critics speculate that Marlow may have been Conrad's English-self or the Englishman he would have liked to have been.

In part 1 of this entry, I mentioned Almayer's Folly (1894), Conrad's first novel.  It is set in Borneo, quickly establishing Conrad's identity as an author who set his stories in exotic places.  At this point, Conrad had been a British citizen for 14 years, but he had spent most of this time at sea in the merchant marine.

Here is a picture from Borneo, a place known for its rainforests and wildlife.

As with Marlow, Conrad would continue to revisit one character from Almayer's Folly, Lingard, in "An Outcast of the Islands" (1895) and The Rescue (published 1920 but begun in the mid-1890s). 

Both Batchelor and Stape discuss Conrad's habit of beginning novels only to drop them and begin a short story that would ultimately become a novel or novella.  Heart of Darkness (1902) began this way, as a short story called "An Outpost of Progress."  Similarly, his novel Lord Jim (1900) began as "Jim: A Sketch."  However, as I have mentioned above, Conrad struggled with writer's block, and moving from project to project seemed to be his best way of dealing with it...even though this strategy was annoying to his agent and his publishers.

Below is a picture of the cover of Lord Jim, a novel about a young man who attempts to redeem himself after he jumps ship.  Batchelor compares the novel's protagonist, Jim, to Hamlet.

 

  Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) are Conrad's most overtly political novels.  The first is set in South America; the other two are set in England and Europe.  In each of these novels, Conrad views political radicalism and intrigue with extreme skepticism. 

 

With Chance (1914), Conrad had his first popular success.  This novel, like several of his earlier works, is set at sea, and it concerns a captain's attempt to ship explosives safely.  (The story that became Chance was titled "Explosives.")  However, unlike his earlier works, Chance includes a love story between an Englishman and an Englishwoman that ends happily.  Prior to this, women did appear in Conrad's work, but as you may notice from "Heart of Darkness," they are often vehicles for the author's social criticism or, as with Winnie Verloc of the Secret Agent or Emilia Gould in Nostromo, voices for this criticism.  In Victory (1915), Conrad's next novel and another success, he places a love story between Heyst, the son of a cynical philosopher, and Lena, a prostitute, at the center of his work; however, she is killed, in part because her relationship with Heyst probably could not exist outside their island.

Conrad continued to write during and after World War I.  His works received much acclaim and respect, perhaps more than their share.  He also tried his hand at adapting several of his works for the stage.  Probably his most successful adaptation was of his late novel Victory, which "ran for eighty-two performances" in 1919.  In 1923, he traveled to the United States.  When he died in 1924, Conrad was working on a novel set during the Napoleonic era in the early 1800s.