Master Harold. . . and the Boys

I'm not sure if we are going to get to this play, but I thought that I'd post this entry while I'm up.  The picture above is from a 2003 performance with Danny Glover as Sam.  As you may have noticed in our book, Glover played Willie in the play's 1982 world premiere.

Recently, a film version was made of this play.  At one point, Glover was to appear in it, but he was replaced by Ving Rhames.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1Pl9VTZ_4

This year this play was performed at the University of Northern Alabama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC8NcGKJGvU

The version below is from Canada:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQOjFs1CyDE

Here you may watch more extended scenes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0fERVCMxtk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDRcx0N5IgE

Here is a link to a performance of another of Athol Fugard's plays:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoTJUKt_HzU&feature=related

1923 Stan Laurel in Roughest Africa

Johann found the following link to a silent comedy with Stan Laurel

Link

The picture above is of Laurel and Hardy.  Here is a link to scenes from their comedies.  You may or may not like the soundtrack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlDd9Cf1Zuw&feature=fvsr

This version is colorized!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI33gTIYX3s

Or you may prefer Charlie Chaplin....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mYtNMDFyXQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDnAslIWDA4&feature=related

Here is a shot of Harold Lloyd:

Johann's Summary - "An Image of Africa"

Link

Please see the link above for Johann's summary of Chinua Achebe's "An Image of Africa."  The summary is a Word attachment, so you will need to open or download it.

By the way, below is a picture of a young Achebe with Langston Hughes.  It is from Hughes' 1962 visit to Lagos, Nigeria.

 

 

Shefali's Summary of Song of Lawino and Ocol

Link

Please see the link above for Shefali's summary.  Thank you.  :)  This is the entry I'd make if I had a little more time.

Here are some videos of Acholi music and dance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPn6aM2slPw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdQv9-ShnmE&feature=PlayList&p=E57C32A5E8280C77&playnext=1&index=38

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH2Ceo6UnMI&feature=related

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

The works of the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o have intrigued me for a while because, for the past thirty-plus years, he has chosen to write them in Gikiyu, an African language, rather than in English.  Gikiyu being his first language, he believes that it is more appropriate for his writing and for African literature.  He views English as a colonizers' language that has been imposed on him.  (He and Chinua Achebe disagree on this.)  However, NwT is his own translator, which solves some of the problems of transmission.  (Note that Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, chose to write in English, rather than in Polish, and that he did not translate his own works into his first language.)

This article from the Global Literacy Project's web site discusses NwT's thoughts on the relationship between language and literature.

http://www.glpinc.org/Classroom%20Activities/Kenya%20Articles/Ngugi%20Wa%20Thiong%27o-On%20Language%20and%20Culture.htm

This article is more extensive and mentions his approach to each language:

http://www.nondomesticatedthinker.com/2010/04/dialogue-among-african-languages-by-ngugi-wa-thiong%E2%80%99o/

Here is a brief biography from 1996:

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

This biography dates from 2001:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/icwt/news/ngugi_bio.html

Since 2001, NwT has returned to Kenya where he and his wife suffered a vicious attack:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview13

Below are some maps that will help you place Kenya.




Below is a picture of a woman picking tea in Limuru, NwT's hometown.  I was surprised to see that it was less than twenty miles from Nairobi, Kenya's capital. 

This summer I was able to read NwT's novel, Petals of Blood.  This book is the last one he composed in English.  It is set in Ilmorog, a fictional Kenyan village that becomes a boomtown over the course of the novel.  Events take place during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after Kenya becomes independent.  Ostensibly, the story is something of a murder mystery as at the beginning, three wealthy men have been killed in a fire.  However, NwT's narrative focuses more on the paths that four friends take over the course of a dozen years.  These friends are Munira, a teacher from a wealthy family; Wanja, a businesswoman who becomes the madam of a brothel; Abdulla, Wanja's former partner; and Karega, a union organizer whom she once loved.  Each man is a suspect in the deaths of the three wealthy men, and each of the wealthy men was involved with Wanja.  (The fire occurred at her mansion.)  Interestingly, NwT finished up this novel in 1977 at a Soviet writers' colony.  (The USSR hadn't yet fallen.)


NwT's next novel, Devil on the Cross, is also set in Ilmorog.  This novel, on the other hand, was written in a Kenyan prison and is the author's first novel in Gikiyu.


I am also reading NwT's recent memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, which was published this year (2010).  It's always interesting to learn more about an author's background since he or she often draws on it for his/her fiction.  Unsurprisingly, NwT grew up in a village, and members of his working-class family were involved in 20th c. struggles against the British.  (Kenya was a British colony until 1963.)  His older brother, Good Wallace, belonged to the Mau Maus, a group that actively fought the British.  Like one of the minor characters in Petals of Blood, he was betrayed, but the ending of his story appears to be happier.  Like Joseph, Abdulla's adopted son, NwT won a scholarship to an elite high school in Kenya.  The memoir ends with his arrival at this school after some surprising twists and turns.

More on Post-Colonial Writing

Just in time for the midterm, I'd like to return to this entry.  If you are going to respond to essay prompt #2, you may want to know a little more about post-colonial writers.  We've read Things Fall Apart, a pioneering example of post-colonial writing, but you may want to know what else is out there.

Let's start with some definitions of post-colonialism.  As Deepika Bahri states in her page on post-colonialism, the definition of this term is not always hard and fast.  This is good to keep in mind.

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

Even in 1998, Paul Brians had some concerns with the term:

http://www.wsu.edu:8001/~brians/anglophone/postcolonial.html

Some students at Brown University attempt to define and respond to this term:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/stolorow1.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/washburn1.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/yancovitz4.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/hander5.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sarowiwa/hander6.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/achebe/hander7.html






For more information about the authors and books above, see the following links. I will be posting from top to bottom, starting with Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian writer now living in the UK.

http://emeagwali.com/nigeria/biography/buchi-emecheta-voice-09jul96.html

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

http://readallday.org/may12.html

Let's move on to Ben Okri and The Famished Road.
http://emeagwali.com/nigeria/biography/ben-okri-19jul92.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/25/ben-okri-poem-twitter

http://armenianodar.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/the-famished-road-by-ben-okri/

Wole Soyinka's The Man Died is an example of life writing.

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/soyinka/

http://nigeriaworld.com/feature/publication/molara-wood/072604.html

We'll conclude with Ama Ata Aidoo, a writer from Ghana.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/aidoo_life.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/aidoo_work.shtml

In addition, here is a list of some post-colonial (and colonial) writers:

http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Groups/postcolonial.htm#authors

As you can see from the list, not all are African, and the list is not all inclusive.

Here is a link to Indra Publishing's list of post-colonial novels.  The publishing company is based in Australia.

http://indrabooks.com/category/theme/post-colonial-literature/






For information about the authors above, see the links below.  Let's start with Salman Rushdie. 
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rushdie.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/salmanrushdie.bookerprize

http://www.kaysbookshelf.com/2008/12/midnights-children-salman-rushdie/

Heart of Darkness (Cultural Background)

As it turns out, there are more than two hundred ethnic groups or tribes in the DR Congo, so this entry will do much less than scratch the surface.  However, I thought that this topic would complement today's class and Chinua Achebe's lecture nicely.

Let's begin with a link to historian John Henrik Clarke's article on the ethnic groups *before* colonization:

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

The Encyclopedia of the Nations has a brief overview of the Congo's ethnic makeup.

http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Africa/Congo-Republic-of-the-ROC-ETHNIC-GROUPS.html

This index from Wikipedia is simply a list, but it is a fairly specific list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethnic_groups_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo



Let's begin with a few links about the Kongo (or Bakongo) after whom the region was named.  The Kongo Kingdom extended from what is now the DR Congo to what is now Angola.

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

http://countrystudies.us/angola/5.htm

This site includes more specific information about their art.

http://www.zyama.com/kongo/pics..htm

The figure pictured above is a power figure.  For more information, see this article:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/chapters/kml/KME5.html

This article concerns the Kongo's original religion:

http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/sub/kongo.html

After 1491, the Kongo were Christian.  The crucifix below is in New York's Met Museum.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acko/hd_acko.htm




The DR Congo has a number of pygmy ethnic groups such as the Mbuti and the Mbenga.  They may be the original inhabitants of this region.  Blogger Rashid Faridi has written up a fairly comprehensive overview of these groups.  The picture above is of a Ba Aka family.

http://rashidfaridi.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/pygmiesafrican-peoples-of-the-rainforest/

For more information about the Ba Aka, see this site:

http://tiki.oneworld.net/features/survival/survival_2_ba-aka.html

http://www.baka.co.uk/baka/

Another group is the Efe:

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2003/11/26/entertainment/art/11_25_0312_31_09.txt

National Geographic has recently published an article on the Mbuti.  The picture below is not from that article but from Yale University's Tropical Resources Institute.  One of its students worked on a project with the Mbuti.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0509/feature5/

For more information about Ellen Brown's project, see this link:

http://www.yale.edu/tri/fellows2004/Africa.html#ellenbrown

Not suprisingly, the Mbuti are known for the bark cloth that they make:

http://www.indigoarts.com/gallery_africanart_textl7.html

Or you may prefer music:

http://www.tower.com/mbuti-pygmies-ituri-rainforest-various-artists-cd/wapi/106408965

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW2lv7_2KQg

However, the pygmies have been victims of outrageous cruelty recently:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2933524.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3869489.stm

To add insult to injury, logging companies have devastated the rainforests where the pygmies live.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/congos-pygmies-take-on-world-bank-to-save-rainforest-from-loggers-396903.html



I'll move on to a little bit about the Chokwe:

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

http://www.zyama.com/chokwe/index.htm

http://www.rebirth.co.za/chokwe_mask_history.htm

Below is an image of one of their masks.  This was used at a king's coronation.

The Chokwe are also known for their chairs and stools:




I'll conclude with some information about the Kuba Kingdom.  The picture above is of a Bwoom mask from that group.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuba/hd_kuba.htm

These links contain information about this kingdom's art:

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/faculty/Miller%20Kuba/Kuba%20Site/kuba_home.html
http://www.zyama.com/kuba/pics..htm


http://www.randafricanart.com/kuba_Bwoom.html

http://www.marlamallett.com/kuba.htm

Below is a picture of the Kuba's raffia cloth:



There is so much more that I could post, but I think that I will stop here for now. 

How does this information add to your understanding of Heart of Darkness?

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.