November 14, 2007

தென்கிழக்கு ஆசியாவின் சீனப் பெரிய மனிதர்கள்

How a few superrich tycoons dominate S.E. Asia economy
சீனா பற்றிச் சில பதிவுகள் முன்னால் போட்டிருக்கிறேன். பார்த்திருப்பீர்கள். இது புலம் பெயர்ந்து ஆசியாவில் பல பகுதிகளில் இருக்கும் சீனர்களையும் அவர்களில் சில பெரு 'நாயகர்'களையும் பற்றியது. கட்டுரையாளர் ஜாக்கிரதையாக எதையும் அச்சு பிச்சென்று சொல்லாமல் அதே நேரம் நம் ஊகத்திற்கு விட்டுச் சீன முதலாளிகள் எப்படி நிழலும் இருட்டுமான இடத்தில், நேரத்தில் வாழ்ந்தபடி பெரும் சொத்துக்களைச் சேர்த்திருக்கிறார்கள் என்று விளக்குகிறார்.
பிரிட்டிஷார் வருமுன், அரபியர்கள் வருமுன் ஆசியாவில் பெரும் கடல் வணிகராக இருந்தவர்கள் சீனரும், தமிழரும், ஒரு சில இந்தியரும். ஏன் சீனர், இந்தியர் கடல் வணிகத்தை விட்டொழித்தனர், கடல் பகுதிகளை ஏன் அராபியக் கொள்ளையருக்கும், பின் பிரிட்டிஷ், யூரோப்பியக் கொள்ளையரிடமும் கைவிட்டுப் பின் ஒதுங்கித் தம் நாட்டின் சுதந்திரத்தையே இழந்து நின்றனர் என்பதெல்லாம் வரலாற்றாசிரியர்கள் இன்னமும் விடை காண முயலும் அவலங்கள்.
இதில் சீனாவை விட இந்தியா இழந்தது ஏராளம். சீனர்களுக்கு எல்லாமே நஷ்டமாகிப் போய் விடவில்லை. ஐரோப்பியர் பகுதிகளாகச் சீனாவைக் கைப்பற்றினர், ஜப்பானியரும் ஒரு பெரும்பகுதி சீனாவைக் கைப்பற்றினார் என்றாலும், சீனா பல பகுதிகளில் இன்னமும் தன் சுதந்திரததைக் காப்பாற்றி இருந்தது. இந்தியாதான் முழுதும் தன் மக்களின் சுதந்திரத்தை இழந்து காலனி நாடாகியது.
இந்திய நண்டுகள் அன்றும் சரி, இன்றும் சரி சக இந்தியரைக் கீழே இழுத்து விட்டு யாரும் அடிமைத்தனத்தில் இருந்து தப்பாமல் கூண்டோடு அடிமையாக இருக்க வைப்பதில் வல்லவர்.
யார் யார் எப்படி இந்தியாவை இன்றும் அடிமை நாடாக்குவதற்குத் துடிக்கிறார் என்று முன்னால் பல பதிவுகளில் போட்டு விட்டதால் இங்கு திருப்பி எழுதாமல் விடுகிறேன். நான் இப்பதிவுகளில் இந்திய தேசியவாதிகளுக்குப் பயன்படும் பதிவுகளாகத்தான் தொடர்ந்து போட முயல்கிறேன். நீங்கள் படித்துப் பலரிடமும் இந்தத் தகவல்களைப் பரப்புங்கள். தம் வாழ்வைத் தாமே முயன்று மேலாக்கும் இந்தியர்தான் இனி இந்தியாவைக் காப்பாற்றி நாடும் மக்களும் வளமாக இருக்க வைக்க முடியும்.

சீனர்களில் பலர் ஆசியாவில் இன்று பெரும் முதலாளிகளாகவும் தொழிலதிபர்களாகவும் வங்கி, இன்சூரன்ஸ், ஏற்றுமதி இறக்குமதி, பயண ஏற்பாடு நிறுவனங்கள், என்று பெரும்பகுதி வர்த்தக, தொழில் துறைகளைத் தம் பிடியில் வைத்திருக்கின்றனர். இந்த புலம் பெயர்ந்த சீன முதலாளிகளிடம் இருந்து ஏராளமான முதலீடு கம்யூனிஸ்டு சீனாவில் போய் இறங்கி இருப்பதை இந்திய கம்யூனிஸ்டுகள் எதுவுமே தெரியாதது போல மக்களுக்குத் தெரியாமல் மறைத்து விடுவார்கள். அது ஏன் என்று பிற்பகுதியில் சுருக்கமாக விளக்கி இருக்கிறேன்.

எப்படி ஸ்டாலின் கொள்ளை, கொலை எல்லாம் செய்து, தொழிற்சாலைகள், மேலும் வியாபாரத் தலங்களுக்கெல்லாம் தீயிட்டு அழித்து உள்ளூர் மாஃபியா போலச் செயல்பட்டுத் திருடியதை அன்றைய லெனினியக் கம்யூனிஸ்டு கட்சிக்கு நிதியாகக் கொடுத்து லெனினுக்கு அவசர நிதி உதவியைச் செய்து பிரதி பலனாகக் கட்சியின் அதிகார மையத்துக்குப் போய்ச் சேர்ந்தாரோ அதே போல இந்த சீன முதலாளிகள் சீனா மாவோவின் பெரும் மூடத்தனமான பண்பாட்டுப் புரட்சி, மேலும் பெரும்பாய்ச்சல் முயற்சிகளெல்லாம் சீனாவை நொண்டி நாடாக ஆக்கி மக்கள் ஈக்களைப் போலச் செத்து மடியும் நிலையில் வைத்ததால், சீனக் கம்யூனிஸ்டு கட்சி நாடு நாடாகக் கப்பரை ஏந்தி நிற்காமல் காப்பாற்றி பெரும் நிதியைச் சீனாவில் முதலீடு செய்ய முன்வந்தனர்.

அதற்கு ஈடாகத்தான் டெங்க் ... பெங் அன்னியச் சீன முதலாளிகளுக்குப் பொருளாதாரத்தில் பெரும் பங்கு வகிக்க அனுமதி தந்து சீனப் பொதுவுடைமைக் கட்சியின் அதிகாரிகளுக்கும், சீன ராணுவத்தின் அதிகாரிகளுக்கும் நாட்டுப் பொருளாதாரத்தை முன்னேற்றுகிறோம் என்ற பெயரில் கொள்ளை அடித்துத் தாமும் பெருந்தனக்காரர்களாக வாய்ப்புத் தந்ததாகப் பல சீனா பற்றிய தற்கால நூல்கள் சொல்கின்றன.
அவை என்னென்ன சொல்கின்றன என்பதைப் பிறிதொரு சமயம் பார்ப்போம். இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் என்ன முக்கியமாகச் சொல்லப் பட்டிருக்கிறது என்று கவனிப்போம்.

இந்தோனேசியா, பிலிப்பைன்ஸ், தாய்லாந்து, மலேயாசியா, மேலும் ஹாங்காங் ஆகிய பகுதிகளில் ஆளும் குழுக்களுக்குக் கையூட்டுகள் கொடுத்து ஒப்பந்தம் வைத்துக் கொண்டு பல துறைகளில் ஏகபோக உரிமைகளைப் பெற்று அந்நாட்டு மக்களுக்கு எந்த உதவியோ, வளமோ சேராமல் தாம் மட்டும் கொழுத்து வளர்ந்தனர் இந்த முதலாளிகள்/ நிறுவனங்கள் என்கிறார் இந்த ஸ்டட்வெல் என்கிற ஆய்வாளர். 20 ஆண்டுகள் இந்த இடங்களில் ஆராய்ச்சி செய்திருக்கிறார்ர். இவர்கள் 'அனைவரும்' குற்றம் செய்து இத்தனை கொழிப்பை அடையவில்லை என்றாலும் அனேகர், பல நேரம் பலவகைச் சட்ட விரோதமான செயல்கள் செய்துதான் செல்வம் திரட்டினார் என்கிறார்.
போதைமருந்து, ஆயுதங்கள் மேலும் மக்களைக் கூடக் கடத்தி இருக்கிறார்கள் இவர்கள். சீனக் குற்றவாளிக் கூட்டங்கள், இந்தோனேசியாவின் குற்றப் பரம்பரைகள் ஆகியோருடன் இவர்களுக்கு உற்ற உறவு என்கிறார். ஹாங்காங் ஏதோ சுதந்திர சந்தை உள்ள இடம் என்ற பிரமை பொதுவில் உலவுகிறது, ஆனால் அங்கு பெரும்பாலான பொருளாதார நடவடிக்கை இந்த சில பெருமுதலாளிகளின் கையில்தான் உள்ளது என்கிறார். ஹாங்காங்கில் உள்ள பெருமுதலாளிகள் செஞ்சீனாவின் ஏற்றுமதி மையங்களில் பெரும் முதலீடு செய்துள்ளனர் என்பது விஷயம் தெரிந்தவர்களுக்குத் தெரியும்.
நம் ஊர் காய்ந்த மிளகாய் மாவோயிஸ்டுகள் தமிழ்ப் பத்திரிகைகளிலும், வலை மையங்களிலும் ஏன் தெருக் கூட்டங்களில் கூட 'சீனா யாரையும் சுரண்டாமல் தனியொரு நாடாக மக்களெழுச்சி மூலமாக கம்யூனிஸ்டு சித்தாந்தத்தின் மேன்மையால் பெரும் வளத்தை அடைந்து விட்டது, நாமும் புரட்சி நடத்தி (பல கோடி மக்களைக் கொன்று குவித்து ரத்த ஆறை நாட்டில் ஓட விட்டு) இப்படிப் பெரும் வளம் பெறுவோம, அதற்கு முன் ஏற்பாடாக இந்திய முதலாளிகளுக்குச் சமாதி கட்டுவோம்' என்று திகிலூட்டும் கருத்துகளால் மக்களுக்கு காதில் ஜிகினா சுற்றி விற்றுக் கொண்டிருக்கின்றனர். மக்களுக்கும், ஏமாந்த இளைஞர்களுக்கும் திருவிழாவில் அண்ணாந்து பார்த்து ஏமாறத் தயாராக இருக்கும் சிறுவனுக்கு கிலுகிலுப்பையைக் கொடுத்து, கைமோதிரத்தைத் திருடும் கள்ளனை ஒத்தவர்கள் இவர்கள். இம்மக்கள் ஏமாந்தாலோ அவர்களில் மூன்று நான்கு தலைமுறைகளை சீனாவுக்கும் சீனப் பண முதலைகளுக்கும் அடிமையாகிப் போவார் என்பது தெளிவு. ஒரு பெரும் சதித் திட்டம் இது என்பது இத்தனை நேரம் வாசகருக்குத் தெரிந்திருக்கும்.
இந்தச் சதிகாரர்கள் தம் பொய்க் கனாக்களை நம்புகிறாரென்றால் முதலில் தாம் போய் சீன முதலைகளுக்கு அடிமைகளாகச் சில வருடங்களாவது ஏவல் செய்யட்டும், பிறகு என்ன சொல்கிறாரென்று பார்ப்போம்.
ஆனால், இந்திய மக்களை அவர் கடும் துன்பங்களுக்கப்பால் வென்ற சுதந்திரத்தை அம்மக்கள் விருப்பப்பட்ட வழியில் அனுபவிக்க விடட்டும் என்று நாம் வலியுறுத்திச் சொல்லுவோம்.
சூ.கா
முக்கியமான பகுதிகளைக் கீழே சாயமிட்ட வரிகளில் சுட்டி இருக்கிறேன். இந்தச் செய்தியை வலையில் பரப்புவீர்களாயின் தமிழ் மக்கள் கொடுங்கோலர்களிடம் இருந்து தப்பித் தம் வாழ்வுக்குத் தாமே எஜமானர்களாக இருக்கும் வாய்ப்பு அதிகரிக்கும்; தமிழக்த்திலாவது ஒரு பொது நன்மை விளையும்.

Asian Godfathers

Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia
By Joe Studwell, Atlantic Monthly Press, 328 pp., $26

Reviewed by Cecil Johnson

Madame Tien, wife of former Indonesian President Suharto and partner to her husband in taking kickbacks, picked up the nickname "Madame Tien Percent" in business circles, writes longtime South Asia watcher Joe Studwell in his fascinating new book, Asian Godfathers.

Studwell, founder of the China Economic Quarterly, inserts the Madame Tien tidbit to underscore the degree to which guanxi, a term used to suggest cozy relationships between political leaders and businesspeople in which bribes are often accepted, has long been a core element of economic and political life in Southeast Asia.

The principal beneficiaries of those relationships have been men whom Studwell calls alternatively godfathers and tycoons - a group of billionaires, descended mainly from Chinese immigrants, who since the end of World War II have dominated the domestic economies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong.

"A small region that, concurrently, could not boast a single non-state corporation among the global top 500 nonetheless accounted for a third of the wealthiest two dozen people on the planet. These are the vanguard of the Asian godfathers, each with more than four billion American dollars to his name - the likes of Li Ka-shing, Robert Kuok, Dhanin Chearavanont, Liem Sioe Liong, Tan Yu and Kwek Leng Beng; behind them a phalanx of lesser tycoons, with one, two and three billion dollars of net worth," writes Studwell.

Most readers, lacking the benefit of Studwell's nearly 20 years of reporting in Asia, will not recognize those names and will not find them easy to remember. But Studwell has provided a cast of characters at the end of the book that includes concise profiles of all the godfathers who are prominently mentioned in his narrative and analysis.

That dramatis personae enables readers to jog their memory about the tycoons being singled out when Studwell refers to them in differing contexts in the book.

In using the term godfathers, Studwell does not mean to suggest that all of the tycoons are criminals, although much of their wealth has been accrued from shady practices. He acknowledges that some of the Asian godfathers have been involved in smuggling, including, to a limited extent, people, drugs and weapons.

"A significant minority also is involved in gambling. These activities frequently involve contact with Asia's criminal underworld - Chinese triads, Indonesian preman, and so on - and this is a fact of life that tycoons deal with. But it does not mean they are mafia bosses. Rather, most Asian organized crime inhabits a parallel, but connected, universe to that of the tycoons," writes Studwell.

The author reprises the political and economic history of the subject countries over the last century and a half. He examines the accommodations the godfathers, in most cases acting as representatives of the Chinese immigrant communities, made with ruling indigenous aristocratic elites, colonial governments, Japanese occupiers, and post-World War II governments.

Those arrangements, he points out, gave the tycoons monopolies in certain crucial areas of the economy that caused local populations to pay higher prices for necessities than they would had there been free trade. At the same time, he points out, the tycoons enriched themselves without fostering much in the way of manufacturing for export.

The godfather domination of the Southeast Asian economies, he explains, has resulted in those countries' lagging behind such North Asian countries as South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. It also has fostered an unacceptable level of poverty among the common people while the rich get richer.

That is glaringly true in Hong Kong, he says, pointing out a cognitive disconnect among Hong Kong's superrich and the realities of life among the port city's common people.

Studwell unequivocally rejects Milton Friedman's evaluation of Hong Kong as a bastion of free trade: "Such assertions reflect a focus on Hong Kong's status as a free port with tariff- and exchange-control-free international trade. But Hong Kong's domestic economy, where the godfathers operate, is a different story. It has long been a patchwork of de facto cartels."

He lays much of the blame for the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s in the laps of the godfathers and predicts that some of those countries, particularly the Philippines, could go the way economically of some fringe Latin American countries if they continue to do business as usual.

Cecil Johnson is a free-lance reviewer. He can be reached at linden35swbell.net. Find this article at:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/books/20071111_How_a_few_superrich_tycoons_dominate_S_E__Asia_economy.html © Copyright 2007 Philly Online, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

November 08, 2007

உள்ளும் வெளியும்- காலனியக் கடப்பு நிலை

சயித் காலனியவாதிகள் உலகை இன்னமும் ஆள்வதாகக் கவனித்து சினப்பட்டு எழுதிய நூல்களில் நீதி தேடும் நோக்கம் இருந்திருக்கலாம். ஆனால் நீதி தேடுபவர் பொய்களைச் சொல்லி நீதி பெறுவது தற்காலிக வெற்றிகளையும் நெடுங்காலக் கசப்பையும் தான் தரும் என்பது என் கருத்து. எந்நிலையிலும் தர்மம் தவறாத, நேர்மை தவறாத ஒரு இயக்கத்தைத் தேடுவது அவசியம்.

இது அடைய முடியாத ஒரு இலக்குதான். ஆனால் எவ்வளவுக்கு இந்த இலக்குக்கு அருகில் வருகிறோமோ அந்த அளவுக்கு நம் வரலாறு, கைக்கிட்டிய வாழ்வு மேன்மையானதாக அமையும். அதிகாரம்தான் நியதியை உருவாக்குகிறது என்பது மார்க்சியப் பஞ்சாங்கம். புரட்சி செய்கிறோம் என்ற பெயரில் பஞ்சாங்கத்தைப் புரட்டி அதிகாரத் தேட்டையை மையமாக்குகிறார்கள் பெருவாரியான இடதுகள். எதார்த்த வாழ்க்கை அவர்களுடைய மோசமான அடைப்புக் குறிகளுக்குள், கட்டுப்படுத்தும் ஆணவத்துக்குள் அடங்காத பெருவெள்ளம் என்பதுதான் நமக்கு இன்னமும் எதிர்காலத்தை சாத்தியமாக்கி இருக்கிறது.

இங்கு ஒரு முன்னாள் காலனிய நாட்டு எழுத்தாளர் தன் விடுதலை முயற்சியில் என்ன சங்கடங்களை எப்படி எதிர் கொண்டார், காலனியத்தில் இருந்து உடலளவில், நாட்டளவில் விடுபட்டால் போதாது, மனதளவில், சிந்தனை அளவில் விடுபடுவது அவசியம் என்று எப்படி உணர்ந்திருந்தார் என்பன விவரிக்கப் படுகின்றன. ஆனால் அவர் கருதிய அளவு காலனியம் எளிதில் சிந்தனையில் இருந்து நீங்கவில்லை, எதார்த்த வாழ்வு தனி நபர் விருப்பத்துக்கு வளைவதில்லை என்பது அவருக்குப் புரிகிறது.

இருந்தாலும் எதார்த்தம் தனி நபர் விருப்பத்துக்கு ஓரளவாவது அசைந்து கொடுக்கும், அந்தத் தனி நபர் இடம் காலம் களமறிந்து இயங்கினால் என்பதும் அவருக்குத் தெரிகிறது. எனவே, அதனோடு அவர் தொடர்ந்து பொருதுகிறார். அவர் நடத்திய போராட்டம் பற்றி இன்னொரு அல்ஜீரிய எழுத்தாளர் எழுதுகிறார்.

இதில் ஃபார்முலாக்கள் உதவாது. சயித் எழுதிய காலத்தில் அது புதிய கருத்தாக்கம் போலத் தோன்றினாலும் கடந்த பதினைந்தாண்டுகளில் மெல்ல மெல்ல சயித்தின் அணுகல் தவறு என்பது நிறுவப்பட்டு வருகிறது. அவருக்கு உண்மையில் அராபிய எழுத்தாளர்களையோ, இஸ்லாமியப் பண்பாட்டையோ பற்றி அதிகம் தெரியவில்லை என்பதை முந்தைய பதிவில் ஒரு இஸ்லாமிய/ அரபியக் கண்ணோட்டத்தில் எழுதப்பட்ட கட்டுரை சுட்டி இருந்தது. அதே போல உலக அரங்கில் தென்னாசியாவின் பிரதிநிதிகளாக உலவும் பல 'இந்திய/ பாகிஸ்தானிய' எழுத்தாளர்களுக்கு எந்த இந்திய மொழியும் உருப்படியாகத் தெரியாது என்பதோடு, அவர்கள் தம் 'தாய்' மொழியாக ஆங்கிலத்தைத் தான் கருதுகிறார்கள் என்பதையும் நாம் கவனிக்க வேண்டும். இதனால் 'பிராந்திய' மொழி என்று அவர்கள் கருதும் மக்கள் மொழிகளில் உள்ள இலக்கியங்களை அவர்கள் கவனிப்பதே இல்லை அல்லது அந்த மொழிகளின் பரிச்சய்த்தோடு படிக்க முடிவதில்லை.
உலக அரங்கில் இவர்கள் இந்தியாவின் நாடியே தம் கையில் இருப்பது போல ஒரு பம்மாத்து செய்து வலம் வருகின்றனர். இவர்களுடைய சிந்தனை பெரும்பாலும் யூரோப்பிய மதிப்பீடுகளாலும், கிருத்தவ அறத்தாலும், மார்க்சிய பஞ்சாங்கத்தாலும் பாதிக்கப்பட்டது என்பதைப் பற்றி இவர்களுக்குச் சிறிதும் நாணமோ தயக்கமோ இருப்பதில்லை. ஏனெனில் இந்திய நாகரிகம் ஒரு கிணற்றுத் தவளை, தாமே உலக நாயகர் என்று இவர்கள் கருதுகிறார்கள். இதனால் இந்தியா பற்றி எழுத ஒரு சல்மான் ருஷ்டி, பங்கஜ் மிஸ்ரா போன்றவர்தான் கிட்டுகிறார்.
சயிதியம் என்பதே மேற்கின் மொழி, மேற்கின் சிந்தனை, மேற்கின் அற மதிப்பீடுகள் ஆகியவற்றைக் கருவியாக, ஆயுதமாக வைத்து மேற்கைத் தாக்குவதும், அத்தோடு நிற்காமல் திரும்பி தம் மூல நாட்டை அது உலக மதிப்பீடுகளுக்கு ஈடாக எழாததாகத் தொடர்ந்து விமர்சிப்பதும் ஆகும். இதைத்தான் ருஷ்டி, மிஸ்ரா போன்றார் செய்கிறார். இதையே இந்தியாவில் உள்ள பலவகை இடது சாரி எழுத்தரும் உள்நாட்டு மொழிகள் தெரிந்திருந்தும் அவற்றால் பாதிக்கப்படாமல் மார்க்சியப் பஞ்சாங்கத்தால் மட்டுமே பாதிக்கப் பட்டு அதன் வழி எல்லாவற்றையும் விமர்சிக்கிறார்.
இந்த எலிப் பொறிகளில் சிக்காமல் அஸ்ஸிய ஜேபர் (Assia Djebar) சில வேறு விதமான அணுகுமுறைகளைக் கையாள்கிறார். அவை நாட்டிலேயே வசிக்கும் இந்தியருக்கு உதவாது. ஆனால் வெளிப் புலங்களில் வசிக்கும் இந்தியருக்கு உதவ வாய்ப்பு இருக்கிறது.
சூ.கா

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-11-02-lusteboulbina-en.html

Articles

Seloua Luste Boulbina

Being inside and outside simultaneously

Exile, literature, and the postcolony: On Assia Djebar

As an Algerian novelist writing in French, Assia Djebar had to find a way to Arabize the language of the former colonizer; in doing so, she has cut the "umbilical cord" to her country of origin. Her writing, says Seloua Luste Boulmina, in an article based on her speech at the 20th European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Sibiu 2007, turns the tables on the post-colony. The question now is not, "Can the subaltern speak and write?", but "Can the non-subaltern hear and read?"

Exile in literature is not only a story but also a structure. When France occupied Algeria in the nineteenth century (1830-1857) and turned it into a colony, the Algerian people were, in a sense, expelled from their own country. If one bears in mind that the acquisition of property is the main purpose of any colonization, it could be said that Algerians were evicted from their own country while remaining within it. This unique and violent situation lasted until Algeria gained independence in 1962.

What's normal, anyway?

Algerians were considered by the French to be less intelligent and less civilized than themselves. They were placed on the "wrong" side of the dualities "sound versus meaning", "body versus mind". Teaching Arabic and Berber was in effect forbidden. Consequently, Algerians had to learn to deal with and to understand the colonizers. It was a sure way not to feel "at home", to lose both confidence and hope. To be excluded from the centre, to become decentred, are the main characteristics of the subjective experience of colonization. To break the colonial chains in the struggle^[1] for independence is different from decolonization. Independence is not the end but the beginning of the decolonization process. Independence is not the end of being decentred.

After independence, the linguistic situation did not improve (despite political independence and better social conditions). French is not a global language like English; it is not a way to communicate regardless of location. French was a colonial language and is now a local language. After independence, the Algerian government chose Arabic as Algeria's official language. Strangely, however, Arabic is not an Algerian but a Middle-Eastern language. Unlike Arabic, the autochthonous Algerian language – Berber (whose variations include Kabyle or Tamazigh) – is unwritten. The French government, on the other hand, chose to continue its francophone policy in the former French colonies in Africa (North Africa included). Upon independence, then, Algeria was born with two foreign languages: Arabic and French.

Algerians, including writers, were in exile in Algeria before independence. That is why exile should be regarded as a movement rather than a location. But what kind of movement? With Algeria, it was double: in the mind and in language. This movement is unheimlich: strange but uncannily familiar. The novelist Assia Djebar is a case in point. Like the father of novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine, her father belonged to dual cultures: Muslim and Arabic mixed with French and European. Both writers published their first book in the 1950s: Nedjma (Kateb) in 1956 and Thirst (Djebar) one year later.

Assia Djebar was born Fatma Zohra Imalhayène^[2] in june 1936 in Cherchell. She spent her childhood in Mouzaia, where her father was a teacher.^[3] She attended school at Blida's college in Algeria (1946-1953); here there were approximately 20 French Muslims studying modern literature (before the Second World War war, Algerians were classified as "indigenous"; afterwards they were called "French Muslims"). At Blida's college, Djebar discovered literature in languages with phone (Arabic and French) and without phone (Greek and Latin). Around the time of the publication of Thirst, Djebar was admitted into the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; she was, however, expelled before she could finish her studies.

Language played a crucial political role in post-colonial Algeria. Kateb Yacine called the French language "the spoils of war" ("La langue française reste un butin de guerre.") and considered the best way to write was to continue to use it. His idea was to adopt French as a free choice; however Kateb felt guilty about speaking and writing in French and decided to use Algerian Arabic in his plays. Can the subaltern speak? The subaltern has already demonstrated his ability to speak: to elaborate an intellectual or literary discourse. Can the subaltern write? The subaltern must now find a way to make French his own language. That is why I prefer to talk about Djebar's "francographie" instead of her "francophonie". It is no longer the time for Algerian authors to demonstrate their ability to speak French, but to write it too. Djebar distinguishes between "texte francophone" and "écrit français". Her distinction is based on gender (masculine or feminine); belonging (land or territory); parentage (their memory, their history, their authority); and language (first or second language, written or spoken).

Djebar's books incarnate the effort to decolonize her language in a post-colonial environment. Is she an "Algerian author"? She has been a member of the French Academy for two years and is the first female member to come from a former-French colony.^[4]. Djebar lives in three places, the third of which is New York. It is impossible for her to work in Algeria, because she has no freedom there; the recent civil war is a further reason for her to stay away. She cannot work in France because, like many others from the "South", she has no place there. Exile can be a third space. Djebar says she is inside and outside at once. For her, exile is a tragedy but also an opportunity to be able to think inside (hic et nunc) from outside (anywhere).

In her world, Djebar is concerned with three countries (Algeria, France, the United States) and three languages (Berber, Arabic and French). Language is the main character in Djebar's books^[5] (the second is death^[6]). Her language is Arabophonic (with sounds and accents) in a French hybrid (and style). She transforms writing into talking. It is her way to cut the "umbilical cord" (Kateb Yacine) to her country of origin, to her land. Yet she was already in exile when she lived in Algeria; literature is always exile. Writing goes beyond childhood and lost time; it is a universal situation. But it does not always have the same meaning, with the same things at stake, for all writers. It depends on one having place(s) in one's own land or country (of origin), in one's own (or first) language.^[7] The subaltern has no place in Algeria's colonial organization, yet Djebar is not looking for a place to write. If we are to admit that the mother tongue is "the" place, then the post-colonial writer is definitely not there.

On the other hand, choosing French and living abroad creates a great sense of debt in Assia Djebar's writing. Because of this, she devotes her energy to building "tombs" (tombeaux) to Jean Senac, Malek Haddad, and many other Algerian and intellectual friends. She also writes to build an Algerian and literary genealogy. To be in exile is to surrender one's past; exile is something like mourning. In Aranda (the language spoken by Australian Aborigines), the poetic and archaic term eraritjaritjaka means, as Elias Canetti pointed out, to be "moved by something lost". When Heiner Goebbels conceived the play Eraritjaritjaka (2004), based on texts by Canetti, he imagined two houses on stage. One was very little, like a doll's house. The other was a place to live, to read, to write. Home is the best metaphor to express what literature (and art) do. According to this point of view, literature is not a monument, but a house, a place not to feel good, but simply to exist. Rainer Werner Fassbinder said that each of his films was a way to build a house and to be at home. Assia Djebar's literary exile is something between home and the grave.^[8]

What cannot be said must be kept silent (Wittgenstein). Or perhaps: what cannot be said must be written. In Assia Djebar's work, French is not official and formal "armour". Nor it is a "veil". Rather it is a "second skin". French is "white",^[9] a colour where all other colours can be painted and written. Skin envelops the body and is the limit between inside and outside. Moving inside from outside and outside from inside is what Djebar does when she writes. She related a particular linguistic experience in Le Blanc de l'Algérie, a book written in memory of three Algerian intellectuals murdered in 1993 during the civil war (Mahfoud Boucebci, a sociologist; M'hamed Boukhobza, a psychiatrist; and Abdelkader Alloula, a playwright). She told of her relationship with her friends, mentioning that, in their conversations, French was the appropriate and neutral language between a man and a woman.^[10]

When Djebar was elected to be a member of the French Academy – to join the French "immortals" – she said (quoting Diderot and his Letter on the deaf and dumb) that she would like to be inside and outside at the same time. How does she attempt this? She transforms written French into a foreign written language from the French point of view. She gives another land, her own Mediterranean and postcolonial land, to written French. She Arabizes French with Arabic sounds and Algerian accents. She invents a territory: "Writing and Algeria as territories" ("L'écriture et l'Algérie comme territories"^[11]). She says that literature is a desert ("Le désert de l'écriture"): a land without people and cities, where the writer is alone, a desert that is to be crossed silently. It is a typically Mediterranean – Christian and Muslim – metaphor. At the (happy) end, there is always an oasis.

In this context, French can disappear – as in the novel entitled The disappearance of French (La disparition de la langue française).^[12] The novel's protagonist is Berkane,^[13] a migrant who returns to his country of birth (perhaps his parent's country). Living in Algeria, he rediscovers places with words (words with places) and words as places. Once again, he's a young boy in the casbah: ould el houma, l'enfant du quartier, a street kid. When he hears Arabic, he returns to Algiers, Djazirat el Bahdja, the beautiful city, and he feels at home. The return to his native country is an appeal to bilingual French-Algerian shadows: Nil street, zenkette el Meztoul, rue du Drogué, drug addict street... here French becomes Arabophonic. While Leopold Sédar Senghor^[14]"Wolofizes" French and Ahmadou Kourouma^[15] "Malinkizes" it, Assia Djebar "Arabizes" the French language. In this operation, French disappears and post-colonial writers are born in exile.

All things considered, in literature, exile depends more on language than on location. That is why it is possible to compare Assia Djebar with Elias Canetti and Kateb Yacine, and Franz Kafka. Literature is not another language, another style: literature is the Other language.^[16] To a greater or a lesser extent, these writers have a voice, not just a style. The reader therefore faces a great challenge: to hear the author's voice and accent. In Assia Djebar's work, literature is both research (ijtihad) and healing (shefa').^[17] Literature is a way to rediscover phone in language.^[18] An example of Djebar's concern with the phonetic qualities of language: the title of her novel Les Alouettes naïves was prompted by an account of how French soldiers called young dancers from Ouled-Naïl, an Algerian region, "Alouettes naïves" (naive larks).

Canetti, Kateb, Kafka... Assia Djebar. She has transcended tradition. As a woman, it was difficult for her to gain acceptance in Algeria.^[19] Literature must not be confused with translation. In her literature, exile has a strong accent. Translation involves two written languages. But since there are no fixed forms of language, either written (French) or non-written (Algerian), it is impossible to move from one to the other, like in a translation. Here, writing is different. Moreover, Assia Djebar writes from a feminine linguistic universe. In Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement ("Algerian women in their apartment": the title is a reference to Eugène Delacroix's great painting), Assia Djebar wrote that translation was impossible for her.^[20]

Djebar moves from official language to personal language, from French to Arabic, she crosses the North African border between man and woman, she goes from Africa to Europe, then from Europe to America. The post-colonial context is complex, complicated, and sometimes hostile. Movement is necessary in order to live, to think, or at the very least to write. Unlike in Proust, there is no nostalgia in this literature because the past has no magic charm. In a lecture on Albert Camus, Djebar noted that Camus didn't have a mother tongue ("la non-langue maternelle de Camus").^[21] Albert Camus never heard his mother speak: she was mute. At that time, Djebar felt nostalgic about her own mother tongue, which prevented her from writing: Assia Djebar's mother spoke French with her neighbours without having learned to write it.^[22]

In this postcolonial context, exile is not an accident. Postcolonial literature shares features with European Jewish literature.^[23] Cosmopolitics is the other face of globalization; it does not necessarily entail the disappearance of identity. In this respect, it differs from "metissage" (the cultural mix). Cosmopolitical literature is a hybridization in which literature can develop other faces and new aspects. It is found in a "third space" – a literature that is neither from the country of the former colonial subject (Algeria) nor the country of the former colonizer (France); it is a literary language that is neither French nor Arabic. Therefore, the concept of movement allows one to define exile as literature, and literature as exile. The summary of L'Amour, la fantasia's is a case in point. The title of the third part of this book is "Les voix ensevelies" (buried voices). It is divided into five "movements" – like piece of music. The following is taken from the first movement: "the two strangers".^[24]

A l'aéroport, directement ! ai-je précisé.
Mon père, que j'ai si peu connu, était français ; Taos, dans son exil, l'est restée. J'ai eu l'heureuse idée d'inscrire Meriem, à sa naissance, sur mon passeport également français, que je croyais pourtant ne plus avoir à utiliser... Dans l'avion pour Marseille, après le décollage, je songe enfin à l'attente de Fatima, là-bas, à son inquiétude.
De Marseille, nous prenons le bateau pour Palma. Taos nous accueille toutes deux, le sourire dans les yeux, mais sans poser de question.
-Voyageuses sans bagages ! dis-je, mélancolique.^[25]

Now, the question is no longer whether the subaltern can speak, nor whether he can write. The real question now is: can the non-subaltern hear and read? Is he able to understand new voices, new sounds, new accents, from outside? Can France have a relationship with its ex-subaltern? When this happens, post-colonial countries will be decolonized. It will be the end of the postcolony.

___________________________________________________________________

^[1] Addressing the French Academy on 22 June 2006, Assia Djebar said: "La France, sur plus d'un demi-siècle, a affronté le mouvement irréversible et mondial de décolonisation des peuples. Il fut vécu, sur ma terre natale, en lourd passif de vies humaines écrasées, de sacrifices privés et publics innombrables, et douloureux, cela, sur les deux versants de ce déchirement. [...] L'Afrique du Nord, du temps de l'Empire français, – comme le reste de l'Afrique de la part de ses coloniaux anglais, portugais ou belges – a subi, un siècle et demi durant, dépossession de ses richesses naturelles, déstructuration de ses assises sociales, et, pour l'Algérie, exclusion dans l'enseignement de ses deux langues identitaires, le berbère séculaire, et la langue arabe dont la qualité poétique ne pouvait alors, pour moi, être perçus que dans les versets coraniques qui m'étaient chers."
^[2] Assia Djebar is her nom de plume.
^[3] "Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l'école". "Fillette arabe allant pour la première fois à l'école, un matin d'automne, main dans la main du père. Celui-ci, un fez sur la tête, la silhouette haute et droite dans son costume européen porte un cartable, il est instituteur à l'école française. Fillette arabe dans un village du Sahel algérien." Assia Djebar, L'Amour, la fantasia (1985), Le Livre de Poche, 1995, 11.
^[4] In the West Indies, people believe Aimé Césaire could be elected to the French Academy
^[5] Especially Oran langue morte; La disparition de la langue française; and, not least, Le blanc de l'Algérie. "La littérature algérienne, et il faut la commencer à partir d'Apulée au IIe siècle jusqu'à Kateb Yacine et Mouloud Mammeri, en passant par Augustin, l'émir Abdelkader et Albert Camus – s'est inscrite dans un triangle linguistique." Berber, "une langue du roc et du sol, disons de l'origine"; Arabic, "une deuxième langue, celle du dehors prestigieux de l'héritage méditérannéen"; French, "troisième partenaire de ce couple à trois, se présente la plus exposée des langues, la dominante, la publique, la langue du pouvoir". Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2002, 243.
^[6] Assia Djebar, Vaste est la prison (1995), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2005, 11 ("Le silence de l'écriture"): "Longtemps j'ai cru qu'écrire c'était mourir, mourir lentement. Déplier à tâtons un linceul de sable ou de soie sur ce que l'on a connu piaffant, palpitant. L'éclat de rire – gelé. Le début de sanglot – pétrifié."
^[7] In La Disparition de la langue française, Assia Djebar cites Georg Trakl: "En terre obscure repose l'étranger."
^[8] "Je reviens donc, aujourd'hui même, au pays [...] 'Homeland', le mot, étrangement, en anglais, chantait, ou dansait en moi, je ne sais plus : quel est ce jour où, face à la mer intense et verte, je me remis à écrire – non, pas le jour de mon retour, ni trois jours après mon installation dans cette villa vide." Assia Djebar, La Disparition de la langue française (2003), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2006, 13.
^[9] Assia Djebar's novel Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995) is a "livre des haltes" in remembrance of Kitab el-Mawaqef d'Abdelkader el-Djezaïri. "Evoquerai-je Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995, 235), comme dans la langue espagnole – la plus proche, après tout, pour nous, parmi nos métissages européens – elle qui parle de 'donner dans le blanc', c'est-à-dire de tirer dans la cible, évoquerai-je pareillement le blanc pour moi ? La plus riche des couleurs qui trompe le moins possible, c'est bien cette flaque ronde en moi, en nous – langue de l'Autre, devenue pour certains tunique, voile ou armure, mais elle est pour les plus rares, quasiment leur peau !" "Je ne peux pour ma part Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995, 241) exprimer mon malaise d'écrivain et d'Algérienne que par référence à cette couleur, ou plutôt à cette non-couleur. 'Le blanc sur notre âme agit comme le silence absolu,' disait Kandinski." Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2002.
^[10] Ibid. 11. "Mes amis me parlaient en langue française, auparavant ; chacun des trois, en effet, s'entretenait avec moi en langue étrangère : par pudeur, ou par austérité." They all prefered to speak French because of its "impersonality", its "neutrality" in comparison with Arabic.
^[11] Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 244.
^[12] Assia Djebar, La Disparition de la langue française, (2003), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2006.
^[13] Berkane is compared to a widow: "une veuve des temps anciens qui doit traverser quarante jours dans le noir ou dans la méditation"; "J'avais perdu, dit-il, ma propre voix, mes deux langues soudain brouillées, confondues, emmêlées, comment lui expliquer ce n¦ud en moi – et cette mémoire compacte du plaisir ?" Ibid. 68, 105.
^[14] The first president of Sénégal, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), is also a writer. He is the first African man to be admitted at the Agregation de Lettres and to be elected to the French Academy (1983). He said that his first years in France (1928-1944) were "years spent wandering".
^[15] Ahmadou Kourouma (1927-2003) is an Ivoirian Malinké author. He spent the most part of his life in exile : Algeria (1964-1969), Cameroon (1974-1984), Togo (1984-1994). At the beginning of Ivoirian civil war, he critiqued "Ivoirity" and national identity.
^[16] The chapter of Vaste est la prison, entitled "L'effacement sur la pierre", bore the following inscription from Charles Dobzynski: "J'avais peut-être enterré l'alphabet. Je ne sais pas au fond de quelle nuit. Son gravier crissait sous mes pas. Un alphabet que je n'employais ni pour penser ni pour écrire, mais pour passer des frontières..." Charles Dobzynki, a French poet, was born in Warsaw in 1929. His parents moved to France a year later. He published a Yiddish poetry anthology.
^[17] "Mon français, doublé par le velours, mais aussi les épines des langues autrefois occultées, cicatrisera peut-être mes blessures mémorielles." (22 June 2006)
^[18] Assia Djebar, Oran langue morte, Paris, Actes Sud, 1997, 33: "Oran m'est devenu mémoire gelée et langue morte." ; 35: "Chère Olivia, je devrais un jour t'apprendre l'arabe, ou tout au moins mon dialecte, qui se rapproche du parler marocain de Fès et de Tétouan. [...] En arabe, vois-tu, la tante maternelle se dit khâlti et ce khâ qui se prononce en chuintement au fond du palais est en opposition radicale avec 'amti, la tante paternelle qui, elle, a droit, comme première consonne, à un Œayn qui est émis avec rudesse, de l'arrière fond du palais."
^[19] In an interview with Catherine Bédarida (Le Monde, 18 June 2005, "L'Académie française ouvre ses portes à Assia Djebar"), she said: "Le Maghreb a refusé l'écriture. Les femmes n'écrivent pas. Ecrire, c'est s'exposer." She also wrote in Oran langue morte : "J'ai le désir d'ensoleiller cette langue de l'ombre qu'est l'arabe des femmes."
^[20] "Je pourrais dire "nouvelles traduites deŠ", mais de quelle langue ? De l'arabe ? D'un arabe populaire ou d'un arabe féminin ; autant dire d'un arabe souterrain. J'aurais pu écouter ces voix dans n'importe quelle langue non écrite, non enregistrée, transmise seulement par chaînes d'échos et de soupirs. [...] Autrefois, me semblait-il, passer de l'arabe populaire au français amenait une déperdition de tout le vivace, du jeu des couleurs. Aussi ne désirais-je me rappeler alors qu'une douceur, qu'une nostalgie des mots [...]" Assia Djebar, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (2002), Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2004, 7-8.
^[21] Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algérie, 29.
^[22] "Ma mère, dans le village de la colonisation où, accompagnant mon père, instituteur de langue française, elle se retrouvait citadine isolée, ma mère tenait surtout, dans ce qui constituait son trousseau en caftans de velours, en bijoux anciens, en coffrets rares, à ses cahiers de musique : elle qui n'écrivait pas le français, qui apprit ensuite à le parler sans l'écrire, grâce à ses voisines françaises, puis à ses enfants, elle ouvrait ces feuillets où, adolescente, elle avait noté la poésie des noubas andalouses." Vaste est la prison, 170-171.
^[23] In Les Alouettes naïves, Assia Djebar quoted Franz Kafka's diaries: "Si tu marchais sur un terrain plat, si tu avais la bonne volonté de marcher et que tu fisses néanmoins des pas en arrière, alors ce serait une affaire désespérée ; mais comme tu gravis une pente aussi raide que toi-même vu d'en bas, les pas en arrière ne peuvent être provoqués que par la confirmation du sol et tu n'as pas à désespérer." Les Alouettes naïves (1967), Paris, Actes Sud, 1997.
^[24] L'Amour, la fantasia, 161. "Deux étrangers se sont approchés de moi au plus près, jusqu'à me sembler, durant quelques secondes, de mon sang : ce ne fut au cours d'un échange d'idées, ni dans un dialogue de respect ou d'amitié. Deux inconnus m'ont frôlée, chaque fois dans l'éclat d'un cri, peu importe que ce fut l'un ou l'autre, ou que ce fut moi qui le poussai." The structure of Vaste est la prison is the same as L'Amour, la fantasia: the title of the third part of this book is: "Un silencieux désir" (A silent desire). This part is divided into seven movements.
^[25] Assia Djebar, Femmes d'Alger, 57. "I know of no writer who writes with a surer hand, a sharper eye, a keener mind or a purer heart", Richard K. Priebe, "Dying in Algeria" on Algerian White in Worldview, 2001.

Published 2007-10-31

Original in English
© Seloua Luste Boulbina
© Eurozine

எட்வர்ட் சயிததின் வரலாற்றுத் திரிப்புகள்-

வசதிக்கு வரலாற்றை வளைத்தால் என்ன ஆகும்? தமிழ்நாட்டில் திராவிட வரலாற்றாசிரியர்கள் எழுதுகிற முழுத் திரிப்பு வரலாறு போல அல்லது கடந்த நவீனத்துவ/ இடதுசாரிகள் இந்தியாவிலும், தமிழகத்திலும் எழுதுகிற பல வரலாற்று நூல்களைப் போலக் கோணலான வரலாறாக இருக்கும். எதையும் நசிவு என்று சொல்வோம் என்று முன்கூட்டியே முடிவு செய்து அணுகினால் எல்லாம் நசிவு என்றுதான் தெரியும். தன் மேதாவித்தனத்தில் எந்த சந்தேகமுமில்லாத லெனினியம் ரஷ்யாவை அழித்தது போல தம் பாரம்பரியத்தை இவர்கள் கடன் வாங்கிய கருத்தியல்களை வைத்து அழிக்க பெரும் பாடு படுகிறார்கள். முடிவு இவர்கள் விரும்பியது போல இராமல் நன்மையாக இருக்கவே இந்த வகை எதிர் விமர்சனங்கள் உதவும் என்று நம்புகிறேன்.
பொய்மை எல்லாக் காலத்திலும் ஆள முடியாது.
இன்னொரு ஆசிரியர் எட்வர்ட் சயித்தின் வரலாற்றுத் திருப்புகளைப் பட்டியலிடுகிறார். இவர் சொல்வதனைத்தையும் நாம் ஏற்க வேண்டும் என்று நான் வாதிடவில்லை. எந்த நாகரிகத்தையும் பற்றி வெளியாட்கள் அணுகிப் படித்து ஆராய முடிய வேண்டும், அவற்றை விலக்க அல்லது எதிர்க்க தன்னிச்சையாக நாம் முயலக் கூடாது, படித்துப் பார்த்து சாரத்தை நன்மை கருதி எடுக்க வேண்டும் என்றுதான் வாதிடுகிறதாக எனக்குத் தெரிகிறது.
ஆராய்ச்சி செய்ய எவருக்கும் உரிமை இருக்கிறது. யார் ஆராயப் படுகிறாரோ அவருடைய நன்மையைக் கருதிச் செய்யப் படும் ஆய்வுக்கும், அவரை அழிக்கக் கருதிச் செய்யப்படும் ஆய்வுக்கும் பலத்த வேறுபாடு உண்டு. கண்டதை அப்படியே எழுதும் நடு வகை எழுத்து மிகக் கடினமான செயல்- அதையும் யாராவது செய்தால் எதிர்க்காமல் அறிவது நல்லது. இவ்வளவுதான் இவருடைய மையக் கருத்து. சயிது போன்ற சிந்தனையாளர்கள் எல்லாம் அரசியல் என்ற வாதத்தால் இயக்கப்பட்டு தாமுமே அரசியலாக மாறிப் போனார்கள்.

பட்சங்கள் இயல்புதான். ஆனால் மனிதரால் பட்சங்களைத் தாண்டி நியாயத்தைத் தரிசிக்க முடியும் என்ற நம்பிக்கை நம்மிடம் இல்லையென்றால் மனித நாகரிகம் என்ற முயற்சியே சாத்தியமாக இராது. பலபண்பாட்டியம் பேசும் இடதுகள் இதையே ஒத்துக் கொள்வதும் இல்லை, நம்புவதும் இல்லை, பிறகு என்ன பலபண்பாட்டியம் தேடுவது என்பது எனக்குப் புரிந்தது இல்லை.
சூ.கா

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:12ZCei_qVC0J:www.axess.se/english/2007/06/theme_irwin.php+site:www.axess.se+%22Orientalism/Saidism%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

THEME

ORIENTALISM/SAIDISM

Said Falsifies the Past

Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism is characterised by a falsification of history and academic snobbery. By his groundless criticism of serious art and research into the past Said disregarded racism against Arabs and Muslims in popular culture.

By Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin is a historian and author of, for example, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (2006)

find Said’s Orientalism most unsatisfactory. But first, what does his book argue? Here it is convenient to quote from the introduction to my book:
‘In a nutshell, it is this: Orientalism, the hegemonic discourse of imperialism, is a discourse that constrains everything that can be thought and written about in the West about the Orient and more particularly about Islam and the Arabs. It has legitimized Western penetration of the Arab lands and their appropriation and it underwrites the Zionist project. Though Said is not consistent about the origins of Orientalism, on the whole he argued that it originated in the work of French and British scholars in the late eighteenth century. However, the discursive formation was not restricted to scholars, as imperialist administrators, explorers and novelists participated in, or were victims of this discourse. The West possesses a monopoly over how the Orient may be represented. Representations of the Orient invariably carry implications about Western superiority, or even, quite often, flat statements about that superiority. Note that it is only possible to talk of representations of the Orient, as the Orient has no objective reality, being merely a construct of Orientalism. Characteristically Orientalism is essentialist, racialist, patronizing and ideologically motivated.’ As Said, himself put it, ‘every European in what he could say about the Orient was consequently a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric’.

Why did Said write his book? He started out as a non-political academic, concentrating his researches on deconstructive approaches to English literature. But by the 1970s he felt that he could not ignore the sufferings of Palestinians. At the same time there were the most grotesque misrepresentations of the Arabs in the press, as well as all sorts of instances of US aggression in the Middle East.

Orientalism falsified the past in large and small matters. Said got the history of the Arab conquests badly wrong. He displayed an almost perfect ignorance of the chronology of British imperialism. He had an anachronistically secular and expansive vision of the nature of universities in pre-twentieth-century Europe. In my book I confined myself to Said’s mishandlings of academic Orientalists, but I shall be astonished if academic specialists in English literature will be prepared to stand up for his bizarrely tendentious readings of such novels as Sir Walter Scott’s Talisman or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.

OF COURSE SOME Orientalists have agendas. Let us consider the intellectual ancestry of Bernard Lewis. Back in the 1960s, when he was a professor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he was already famous as a historian of the Turks, the Arabs and Islam. He has become even more famous or notorious since. His books have sold widely and, since he writes accessibly, such works as The Arabs in History, Islam in History and The Crisis of Islam have influenced millions of students and general readers. He is also a well known Zionist, a defender of Israel’s actions and ambitions. He has been a leading advocate of intervening militarily in Iraq. He has been much in favour with the Neo-Cons in Washington and consulted by the White House. In an article in Atlantic Monthly he coined the phrase ‘Clash of Civilizations’, a phrase that was then recycled as the title of a book by Samuel Huntingdon which, echoing a fear expressed in Lewis’s article, predicted a coming struggle between Islam and Western society.

Lewis in turn had been the student of two famous Orientalists (the term did not have pejorative overtones then) Hamilton Gibb and Louis Massignon. Gibb, who taught at SOAS, got a particularly bad write-up in Said’s book, I am not sure why. Gibb was a great scholar who was keen on importing new methodologies into Oriental studies. He was also anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, passionately optimistic about the futures of both Arab nationalism and Arab scholarship and the man who was one of the first Orientalists to espouse the study of contemporary Arabic literature. He believed that Western Orientalism would soon become irrelevant as the Arabs would take over in analysing and interpreting their own culture.

As for Lewis’s other teacher, Louis Massignon, Said in Orientalism came very close to canonising this French Orientalist as a sainted genius. Massignon, who wrote mostly on Sufi mysticism and Arabic philology, had started out as an enthusiast for the French imperial project and he had worked for Marshal Lyautey in Morocco. Subsequently however, he became a fervent anti-colonialist and like most prominent French Orientalists of the time, including Jacques Berque, Vincent Monteil, Charles-André Julien, Régis Blachère, Claude Cahen and Maxime Rodinson, he campaigned for Algerian independence and protested at French torture of Arabs. He also founded Les Amis de Gandhi to campaign against British rule in India. Besides being anti-imperialist, he was also emphatically anti-Zionist and indeed sporadically anti-Semitic. And he was a terrific French chauvinist.

After a meeting with Ignaz Goldziher in 1905 Massignon regarded himself as Goldziher’s intellectual and spiritual heir and was so regarded by Goldziher. Goldziher (1850-1921) was by common consent of those in field the most important, the most innovative and the most influential Orientalist of the twentieth century. Goldziher’s name occurs just three times in Orientalism, but his work, ideas and influence were not discussed by Said. Why? Surely it is because Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew who wrote in German and who had studied at al-Azhar, was passionately pro-Arab and who repeatedly stressed the dynamism of the Islamic religion, just did not fit Said’s thesis about the collusion of, or the imbrication of imperialism and Orientalism. (Nor more generally did the leading role of German Orientalists fit that thesis either.) In 1920 Goldziher wrote to a Christian Arab friend in Mosul ‘I have lived for your nation and for my own. If you return to your homeland tell this to your brothers’. A year later Goldziher was dead.

GOLDZIHER WAS A meticulous scholar, but his teacher, the flamboyant Hungarian, Arminius Vámbéry was not that kind of scholar and indeed he was something of a charlatan. But Vámbéry was a vigorous campaigner against imperialism and for rights of the Muslim world to be free from Western domination. ‘Constitutional government is by no means a new thing in Islam, for anything more democratic than the doctrine of the Arabian Prophet it would be difficult to find in any other religion’, he wrote.

And so on. Or one could have followed an alternative silsila or chain of transmission from Gibb back to Dennison Ross, the first director of the School of Oriental Studies, and from Ross very swiftly back to the key German Orientalists. One can push the continuous chain of transmission of specialised knowledge and skills back to the immensely influential Heinrich Leberecht Fleisher and from him back to Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838). If one goes further back in time, one finds a fair number of Orientalists, but not continuous chains of them. The first real Orientalist was, I think, Guillaume Postel in the sixteenth century, but he was a lone figure in his time. The seventeenth century was a golden age for Orientalism, but thereafter there was a steep decline of that sort of learning in the eighteenth century.

It is a mistake by the way to think that Said was the first to point out that Orientalists have had agendas and therefore that he opened a debate. Jacques Waardenburg, Raymond Schwab, Anwar Abdalmalik, A.L. Tibawi and various others, including Bernard Lewis, were there before him. And it is natural for scholars to scrutinise their own methodologies and, for example, historians of modern Britain do it all the time, without the prodding of any polemic like Orientalism.

MOREOVER, FIGURES LIKE Vámbéry and Massignon were exceptional in having overt, even flamboyant agendas. The flat dull truth is that most Orientalists have been quiet, scholarly figures, often extremely pious folk who interested themselves in such matters as the position of the Eastern Christian Churches regarding the Eucharist and the date of Easter, or the relationship of Arabic to Biblical Hebrew, or the best way to translate Sufi mystical poetry. It takes a considerable feat of the fantastic imagination to see these dull dogs who cloistered themselves in libraries as the agents of imperialism, racism and Zionism.

As for the prejudiced Orientalists – the ones who published manifestos, wrote to the newspapers, remonstrated with politicians and so on, the prejudices they had far more likely to be in favour of Arabs and Islam, than against. That is and for centuries has been their professional deformation. Indeed, Elie Kedourie denounced most Arabists as being fatally compromised by their love of all things Arab. By and large, with certain glaring exceptions, the Orientalists have been the good guys.

And Said’s Orientalism has misdirected our attention. Who doubts that there is such a thing as Orientalism in the pejorative sense – a presentation of the Orient or more specifically Arab Muslims as corrupt, lazy, decadent and so forth? One would have to be insane to deny such thing. There was and is plenty of racism with respect to Arabs and Muslims in Western culture, but the best places to go looking for it are in government departments, army barracks, police stations, Hollywood film studios, and the editorial rooms of trash newspapers. Orientalism in a pejorative sense comes bubbling up from below – pulp novels, musical hall songs, cartoons, the violent rhetoric of street gangs, fights on the football pitch, and films about fanatical yet corrupt terrorists. It is a very foolish piece of academic snobbery to go hunting for faint hints of Orientalism in the pages of George Eliot or Joseph Conrad, while yet, neglecting the novels of Sax Rohmer and Dennis Wheatley. By misdirecting hostile attention to intellectuals, artists and, above all, academics, Said was indicting those who were mostly the good guys and he turned what should be a serious socio-cultural issue into a campus dog fight.

Moreover, whether Orientalism manifested itself in some recondite but prejudiced work of scholarship such as was indeed produced, for example, by Henri Lammens, or whether it manifested itself in the racial stereotyping in a trashy novel by Sapper about Bulldog Drummond, it seems to me that the importance of that cultural Orientalism for political and imperial history was still not that great. The imperialists – the Cromers, Curzons and T. E. Lawrences did not need Orientalists and they did not read them. Those soldiers in the Sudan, rubber plantation managers in Malaya and magistrates of the Raj who were without intellectual pretensions read Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive, books on pig-sticking and tiger hunting and later maybe they could just about manage the short stories of Somerset Maugham. The ones with pretensions to culture read Homer, Caesar, Cicero and Gibbon – and that is what Cromer, Curzon and Lawrence did. Those classics had a crucial role in framing their ideas about empire. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was written as a kind of Homeric epic.

TURNING TO SAID’S cultural formation, he was born into a Christian family and raised in a largely secular environment. He did not read al-Bukhari, al-Ghazali, or Ibn al-Arabi. I think that this meant that he had a problem with Islam. It is true that he wrote a book entitled Covering Islam in which he denounced Western media misrepresentations, but they were mostly media misrepresentations of Arabs rather than of Islam. His hostility to Islam meant that he was blind to the growing importance of political Islam. He was reluctant to acknowledge the pivotal role of Islam in Middle Eastern history. This was a major reason for his hostility towards the Orientalists. He believed that they had grossly overemphasised the importance of Islam as a political, social and cultural force. But today, when one considers Khomeinism, Hizbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood or the numerous Muslim activist ginger groups or missions, it does not seem to me that those Orientalists like Gibb and Goldziher, who had emphasised Islam’s continuing dynamism and social role, were obviously wrong.

Said was no historian and his chronology does not work. His chief target was Britain and British imperialism and Orientalism, but he got the chronology of the British empire wrong. He failed to realise that for most of the nineteenth century Britain’s chief concern in the Middle East was to prop the Ottoman Empire up. Only in the 1880s did Britain begin to acquire quasi-imperial powers and responsibilities in one country, Egypt. Said (on page 169) writes of ‘an imperial domain which by the 1880s had become an unbroken patch of British held territory from the Mediterranean to India’. This is not factually correct. He has forgotten about the Ottoman Empire, Iran and Afghanistan, none of which were held by the British. Only at the end of the First World War did Britain acquire something that could be called an empire in the Middle East. As for the running together of Orientalism and imperialism, British Orientalism had two heydays. The first in the seventeenth century when Edward Pococke (1604-91) was one of the towering eminences of Arabic scholarship. That was a time when Britain had no overseas empire to speak of, but when the British feared the power of the Ottomans who still threatened Vienna and Christendom more generally and British also feared the depredations of the Barbary corsairs. Tens of thousands of Britons were taken captive and made slaves in North Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second heyday of British Orientalism ran from circa 1945 until the 1970s – a time when Britain’s moment in the Middle East was coming to an end and the British were withdrawing from India, Palestine, Egypt, Aden and the Trucial states.

Said provided no prescriptions for how the Middle East and Islam should be studied. Rather he seems to have wished to have wished Middle Eastern studies to become a no-go area. In Orientalism there is a slippage postulated, to the effect that to study the Orient is to represent it and to represent it is to dominate it. As Christopher Hitchens has written in a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly, ‘Most of all … one must be ready to oppose any analysis that even slightly licenses the idea that outsiders are not welcome to study other cultures. So far from defending those cultures from depredation, such a stance actually permits them to fall under the dominance of stultified and conservative forces to whom everything depends upon an affirmation of blind faith. This and not the enquiry into its origins might be described as the problem in the first place’.

TO CONCLUDE. ONE One wishes the argument of Said’s Orientalism to be right. That is natural, when one considers the wrongs perpetrated by Britain in the Middle East, from the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, to the carve- up of the Arab lands after the First World War, to the destabilisation of Mossadeq in 1953 to the Suez invasion of 1956. There is also of course the fairly steady support given by Britain to Israel. Then again critically alert outsiders must be suspicious of the Orientalists with their quasi-monopoly over difficult languages and claims to special expertise. The idea of an important link between imperialism and old-fashioned scholarship seems attractive. Furthermore the study of the Middle East studies from a Saidian point of view becomes so much more interesting, as one is then engaged in deconstruction and contestation. Scrutiny of the Orientalists then offers similar pleasures to the detective work involved in unmasking a conspiracy. Academics are mostly politically impotent, but here would be useful work to do, work that can be done in a library, which will help to reveal the ideological underpinnings of imperialism, racism and Zionism.

Nevertheless, however much one wishes Orientalism’s thesis might be true, the facts and theories advanced in its support are fatally flawed. Indeed many of the errors seem downright wilful, being generated by a rhetoric without reference to reality. As Joseph Butler, an eighteenth-century bishop, wrote ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?’

ROBERT IRWIN
Robert Irwin is a historian and author of, for example, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (2006)

எட்வர்ட் சையித் மற்றவர்களைச் சொன்ன குறைகளெல்லாம் அவருக்கும் பொருந்தும்ம்

இப்னு வாரக் (உச்சரிப்பு எப்படி என்று தெரியவில்லை. தேட வேண்டும்.) இஸ்லாமிஸ்டுகள், மேலும் பல்கலைகளில் இன்று உச்ச நாகரிகமாக இருக்கும் தன்மயச் சிந்தனை (அதான் போஸ்ட் மாடர்னிசம்/ போஸ்ட் ஸ்ட்ரக்சுரலிசம் இத்தியாதி) ஆகியோருக்கு ஒரு உறுத்தலாக இருக்கும் சிந்தனையாளர். அதனால் ஏதோ மரபுவாதி, பழமை வாதி என்றெல்லாம் ஓரம் கட்ட எண்ண வேண்டாம். அவரும் 'பகுத்தறிவு' தான்.
ஆனால் சமீப காலத்தில் 'பகுத்தறிவு' என்று கோஷம் போட்ட கூட்டமெல்லாம் சிலுவை, பிறை நிலா பின்னால் குழுமியாயிற்று. முன்னால் சிலுவையையும், பிறையையும் நிறுத்திப் பின்னாலிருந்து இந்தியப் பண்பாட்டின் மீது சேற்றை அள்ளி வீசும் கூட்டத்தின் கோழைத்தனத்தைப் பற்றித் திரும்பத் திரும்பச் சொல்லி ஏதும் பயனிருப்பதாகத் தெரியவில்லை. ஆனால் குறைந்த பட்சம் இவை ஆவணங்களாக இருக்கட்டும் என்று எழுதுகிறேன்.
வாரக் அசல் பகுத்தறிவு- கேள்வி கேட்டு நியாயத்துக்கு ஒவ்வாதவற்றை சார்புக்காகச் சப்பைக் கட்டு கட்டி ஆதரிக்காமல் எதிர்க்க வேண்டியதை எதிர்க்கிறார். குறிப்பாக இரண்டாம் தர, கூட்டத்தோடு கோஷம் போடும் 'சிந்தனை'யை எதிர்க்கிறார். சிந்தனை எப்போதும் கட்சிக்காக வாதாடாது, அது எது உயர்ந்தது, எது மனிதருக்கு நல்லது, எது நெடும்காலத்துக்கும் தற்காலத்துக்கும் ஒருங்கே சிறந்த விளைவைத் தரும் என்ற சிக்கல்களில் இறங்கித் தெளிவைத் தேடும். மனிதம் தெளிவுக்குத்தான் பயணிக்கிறது.
வாரக் தெளிவைத் தேடும் நபராக எனக்குத் தெரிகிறார். இன்னும் எவ்வளவு பயணிக்கிறார் என்று பார்ப்போம்.
சூ.கா

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:RoDNygDnGXkJ:www.axess.se/english/2007/06/theme_warraq.php+site:www.axess.se+%22Orientalism/Saidism%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us

THEME

ORIENTALISM/SAIDISM

Tendentious Theory Blocks our View

When Said’s disciples analyse Oriental pictorial art, they fall back on completely arbitrary interpretations. Far too little emphasis is placed on what the world the paintings depict actually looked like.

By Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq is a writer and debater. The article is a revised chapter from his study Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, to be published in September 2007 by Prometheus Books.

n the guest book at the Dahesh Museum on Madison Avenue, in Upper Manhattan, there is an entry by a tourist, possibly German, who enthuses about the Orientalist paintings in the collection, saying how much she admired and enjoyed them. Then, almost as an afterthought, as though she has only just remembered to put on her ideological spectacles, she adds words to the effect that, "of course, they were Orientalist works, hence imperialist and reprehensible." Apparently, she felt guilty for having enjoyed and appreciated Orientalist art. How many other ordinary lovers of paintings, sculpture, drawings, watercolors and engravings have had their natural inclination to enjoy works of Orientalist art damaged, or even destroyed by the influence of Edward Said and his followers? How many people have had their enjoyment of Jane Austen spoiled by Said's insidious claim that Austen was condoning slavery?

Nowadays when discussing Orientalist art, one often begins with Linda Nochlin's article The Imaginary Orient, a work obviously influenced by Said's Orientalism. Nochlin's article can hardly be called art criticism. It is purely polemic, and, at times, quite hysterical. For her, the important element in any analysis of such art must be "the particular power structure in which these works came into being. For instance, the degree of realism (or lack of it) in individual Orientalist images can hardly be discussed without some attempt to clarify whose [italics in original] reality we are talking about." We are immediately in the fantasy world of relativism and parallel universes—"whose reality," indeed. Nochlin assumes that the Orientalist artist must in every case be a symbol of the prevailing political reality, in other words, in the the grip of blind historical forces against which he is helpless, that he must have an imperialistic agenda, and must be a racist. The thought that the artist may indeed be an individual, with his own personal, aesthetic reasons for being in a foreign land, that he possesses freewill, that the artist may actually love the country and its people that he paints, never seems to have occurred to her. For her, he represents the Occident, out to rape the submissive and backward Orient.

IT IS UNFORTUNATE for her ideological argument that she begins with Gérôme's Snake Charmer, which she claims is "a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology." It was placed in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire and seat of the Caliphate, and, of course, was not a European colony. The fact that so many Orientalist artists were working in parts of the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey itself, or Syria and Palestine and the Holy Land, is a simple refutation of this non-stop nonsense about "colonialist ideology." Egypt was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517 and remained a Turkish colony until 1798, when the French expedition under Bonaparte arrived with the intention of reinstating the authority of the Ottomans. The French interlude lasted barely three years. In 1801 a joint British-Ottoman expedition ended the French adventure. Between 1801 and 1882, Egypt was not occupied by a European power, and it was certainly not a European colony, and indeed, in a strict sense, it was never a European colony. It was an Ottoman colony for nearly three hundred years. David Roberts, who painted many magnificent scenes of Egypt and her monuments, died in 1864, and so could not have known that country under European occupation. Algeria was under French rule for 132 years, but as we shall see, those artists who went there developed an affection for and commitment to it, artists such as Eugene Fromentin. Morocco and Tunisia were under French rule for a brief period, roughly forty years each, only in the twentieth century.

Nochlin continues, "the watchers huddled against the ferociously detailed tiled wall in the background of Gérôme's painting are resolutely alienated from us, as is the act they watch with such childish, trancelike concentration. Our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque delectation." "Ferociously detailed tiled wall?" What exactly is her complaint? The wall is very skillfully rendered, and Gérôme, like many other Orientalist painters, delighted in depicting sensuous, colorful detail of materials, cloths, carpets, costumes, and ceramics and marble. "Childish, trancelike concentration:" apart from the condescension implicit in "childish," Nochlin's finds their gaze "trancelike;" I would describe it rather as "interested," especially the black figure on the left who leans forward in eager anticipation, with a slight smile on his face.

"Clearly, these black and brown folk are mystified—but then again, so are we. Indeed, the defining mood of the painting is mystery, and it is created by a specific pictorial device. We are permitted only a beguiling rear view of the boy holding the snake. A full frontal view, which would reveal unambiguously both his sex and the fullness of his dangerous performance, is denied us. And the insistent, sexually charged mystery at the center of this painting signifies a more general one: the mystery of the East itself, a standard topos of the Orientalist ideology."

NOTICE HOW MS Nochlin's own mystification suddenly, by a sleight of hand, becomes the Orientalists' topos of "the mystery of the East." What is the mystery? We cannot see the boy's genitals. In which case, how does she know he is a he? She finds his buttocks "beguiling," and apparently is disappointed that she cannot see more. She hates being left in an "ambiguous" state. And why are the spectators—condescendingly described by Nochlin as "black and brown folk"!—mystified, since they do have a full frontal view of his sex and hence of his performance? Sexually charged mystery indeed! In what way would a full frontal view reveal to us a "dangerous performance" that is not obvious from the dorsal view? Perhaps the performance is dangerous simply because it involves a snake, but we do not need a front view to figure that out; any angle will do. It is Nochlin herself who leaps from one canvas to generalize about all the Orient. It is Nochlin herself who is guilty of the very reductionistic, essentialist Orientalist generalization of which she accuses this artist. How can one go from one scene depicting a snake charmer to the claim that this represents the entire East? Perhaps it does for Ms Nochlin. It certainly does not for me or thousands of others.

Nochlin claims that the watchers in the painting are "huddled" against a wall, but huddled implies discomfort. They do not look at all uncomfortable. It is Nochlin who is uncomfortable looking at them. She claims that they are "alienated" from "us," but the "us" is really an elliptical expression for herself, for Linda Nochlin. Some of the watchers are looking at the boy with the snake, but some appear to be watching an unrendered event behind the flutist. This further undermines Nochlin's analysis.

"Gérôme suggests that this Oriental world is a world without change." Gérôme, claims Nochlin, avoids the French presence. But there was no French colonial presence in Turkey where this painting is placed. "The absence of a sense of history, of temporal change, in Gérôme's painting is intimately related to another striking absence in the work: that of the telltale presence of Western man. There are never any Europeans in "picturesque" views of the Orient like these." But here Gérôme is not painting a historical subject or scene. All that Nochlin's extraordinary criticism amounts to is a demand that he paint another picture altogether, whose subject matter is to be dictated by her.

"Indeed," continues Nochlin, "it might be said that one of the defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence."

ONE CAN IMAGINE what Nochlin's criticism of an Orientalist work that did show a European in one of their paintings would be: "Of course, Gérôme would have to put in a European to remind us that it is really the European who is the master; there is no space that belongs to the Oriental, it has all been usurped by the colonialist. The Oriental cannot be left alone even in his own home....." Nochlin complains about "a plethora of authenticating details," especially the "unnecessary ones." Orientalists are accused of painting an imaginary Orient, and then also accused of "insisting on authenticating details. One cannot have it both ways. Should they have left out the authenticating details? Would that have improved the paintings? And would not these details help dispel the mystery that seems to vex Ms. Nochlin? Surely it is the artist's prerogative to decide which details are necessary and which not.

"Neglected, ill-repaired architecture functions, in nineteenth-century Orientalist art, as a standard topos for commenting on the corruption of contemporary Islamic society." Has Nochlin ever been to the Orient? It is her Orient that seems to be imaginary. Even now, one of the most distressing sights, at least for me as someone originally from India, is the physical decay of so many beautiful historical palaces and monuments in contemporary India. It was even worse in the nineteenth century, until a British Viceroy, Lord Curzon, did something about it. The situation was, and is, similar in North Africa, Syria, Egypt, and other Islamic lands. The Orientalists painted what they saw. It is true that ruins do attract the Romantic mind, and have been popular at least since the ruins of ancient Rome were painted by Hubert Robert [1733-1808]. But delight in ruins is an aesthetic attitude, not a political statement.

New York Times journalist Alan Cowell wrote in 1989 that Cairo "oozes decay." As for Istanbul or Constantinople, Orhan Pamuk's entire book on the city is about decay, ruin, neglect and poverty. He grieves for "a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years;" he finds melancholic joy "in the crumbling fountains that haven't worked for centuries; the poor quarters with their forgotten mosques,...the dilapidated little neighbourhood shops packed with despondent unemployed men; the crumbling city walls like so many upended cobblestone streets....". It is ironic and amusing that Edward Said was himself accused of "Orientalism" in the pejorative sense when he complained of the decay in modern-day Cairo.

And, it is well-attested that tiles in Turkish mosques often fell off simply because of the poor quality of the glue used. To capture that dilapidation in paint is not part of the "project of imperialism". Is not Nochlin's claim that Orientalists always paint a timeless Orient, "a world without change," contradicted by her other claim that Orientalists were always painting decay? Decay is a sign of mutability, that things are no longer what they were. Nochlin wants to have it both ways.

NOCHLIN COMPLAINS THAT there are too many lazy natives in Orientalist paintings, not enough people doing their jobs, not enough activity. But she cannot have looked carefully. There is a rich-toned work by Rudolf Ernst in the Dahesh Museum of two men in their workshop, beating into shape copper objects; Charles Wilda's A Coppersmith, Cairo [1884]; E. Aubry Hunt's The Farrier, Tangiers; Edwin Lord Weeks and Eugène Girardet painted tailors at work; and there are any number of paintings of the bazaar bustling with activity, such as Germain-Fabius Brest's View of Constantinople of 1870, now in the museum in Nantes; Albert Pasini's Bazar at Constantinople; Amadeo Preziosi's Market Scene in Cairo; Fausto Zonaro's Barbers Working in a Square in Constantinople. Then there are busy port scenes in numerous paintings such as Carlo Bossoli's Oriental Port. Dervishes are often portrayed, and they are hardly inactive. There are also paintings of hunting with falcons, guns, on horseback, and so on, as in the works of Eugene Fromentin. And what of the exhilarating sense of movement in Giulio Rosati's Successful Raiding Expedition?

The absence of certain activities in a painter's oeuvre cannot possibly be taken to mean that he, the artist, thought the natives were "a lazy bunch of layabouts." In such a shallow interpretation, from the Dutch and Flemish genre paintings of the seventeenth century one would get the impression that the Dutch spent their entire time in taverns, brothels, and merry-making. There are few paintings of people engaged in any work or craft; exceptions include Metsu's Interior of a Smithy, and Brekelenham's Interior of a Tailor's Shop. Yet we know that seventeenth-century Netherlands was a hive of commercial activity, and extraordinarily successful economically. As the art-historian Wayne Franits notes, there are also few paintings of commercial activities in Dutch ports, but we know how busy the ports were.

Nochlin contemptuously dismisses Delacroix who, she claims, was said to have read Herodotus for descriptions of Oriental debauchery. There are no such descriptions in Herodotus. He gives a sober, not a prurient account, of the well-known institute of temple prostitution, and a sympathetic account of the manners and customs of Orientals.

Nochlin lets fly one baseless charge after another. One wonders if she has bothered to really look at, let alone enjoy, a work of Orientalist art. Here are her final thoughts on Orientalist art: "Works like Gérôme's, and that of other Orientalists of his ilk, are valuable and well worth investigating not because they share the esthetic values of great art on a slightly lower level, but because as visual imagery they anticipate and predict the qualities of incipient mass culture. As such, their strategies of concealment lend themselves admirably to the critical methodologies, the deconstructive techniques now employed by the best film historians, or by sociologists of advertising imagery or analysis of visual propaganda, rather than those of mainstream art history." Evidently, for Ms. Nochlin and her ilk, Orientalist art, as John MacKenzie pointed out, "exists on an entirely different plane from that considered by 'mainstream art history.'" In his brilliant demolition, so far from the fashionable nonsense of 'deconstruction' offered by Said and his ilk, MacKenzie takes them to task for their imprecision, especially the cavalier way they talk about "imperialism". MacKenzie insists, "It will not do to pick and mix artists from different points in the nineteenth century and portray them as locked into a set of racial and imperialist assumptions. The durability of the oriental obsession, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries must raise doubts that its 'deconstruction' can be anything other than highly complex, producing different results at varying periods, as well as opposing dualities among artists and even within the single artist's work."

ORIENTALIST ART MUST be seen as a continuation of those aesthetic impulses that began at the dawn of Western painting. Many Orientalist painters and sculptors were motivated by the same artistic desires as those of the Renaissance. Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio and other Venetians, but also Rembrandt and the Flemish Pierre Coeck d'Alost, have been mentioned. Nochlin seems irritated by Gérôme's Arabic calligraphy, but in fact, a little "mainstream art history" would reveal that from the late thirteenth century onward, Western artists were fascinated by Oriental scripts and used it in many of their works. Many artists, not knowing Oriental languages or scripts, invented pseudo-scripts for decorative purposes and used them on textiles, gilt halos, and frames for religious images: artists such as Duccio, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Andrea Mantegna, Gentile da Fabriano, and so on. The one exception was Pisanello, who copied almost exactly the Arabic script that says, "al-Muayyad Abu Nasr Shaykh," in his Studies of Costume Worn by the Emperor John VIII Paleologus and Esatern Delegates at the Council of Eastern and Western Churches in Ferrara, 1438, a drawing now in the Louvre. Rosamond Mack points out that "Italians admired the aesthetic qualities of Islamic calligraphy" and used it in patterned textiles. Early Italian painters were confused about Arabic writing, but Mack writes, "the misapprehension was driven by Western veneration of Christianity's Eastern roots and the desire to possess and preserve that sacred heritage."

Artistic concerns were paramount: "Artistic concerns also played an important role in the various adaptations of Arabic writing and the Islamic objects on which such writing appeared. Giotto and his contemporaries developed an immediately recognizable version of the Eastern honorific garment to make their representations more vivid and, and in their view, more accurate. The imitation writing on halos and frames was ornamentally sophisticated, consistent with the Eastern garments, and perhaps also emphasized that these were images of a universal faith." Aesthetic concerns, along with the ubiquitous Western desire for universalism, were the main impelling forces.

Gérôme and other Orientalists were more successful in rendering Arabic script; they also admired the aesthetic qualities of Arabic calligraphy. Referring to the Arabic inscriptions in Gérôme's Snake Charmer, Nochlin quotes Ettinghausen, a great scholar and expert on Islamic Art, as saying that they could "be easily read." Then Nochlin adds a contradictory footnote: "Edward Said has pointed out to me in conversation that most of the so-called writing on the back wall of the Snake Charmer is in fact unreadable." Pace Said, the large frieze at the top of the painting, running from right to left, is perfectly legible. It is the famous verse 256 from Surah II, al-Baqara, The Cow, written in thuluth script.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE INSCRIPTION thereafter is truncated, so that the upper part is lost, but even then one can make out parts of it, probably not a Koranic verse but rather a dedication to a caliph; the name Uthman is just visible, and possibly the word Sultan. The Turkish artists and architects often added a dedication in mosques, and even on coats-of-arms, such inscriptions as, “The ruler of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdülhamit who puts his trust in God." Or was Gérôme simply copying faithfully a real wall with those very verses? I have learned from Professor Gerald Ackerman that Gérôme executed the painting in his Paris studio, copying a photo from the Topkapi Palace published by Abdullah Frères, the Istanbul photography firm. This discovery makes Nochlin's remarks even further off the mark.

Many copper vessels, plates, and weapons decorated with silver and gold and produced in Egypt, Turkey, or Morocco, both contemporary and those manufactured a hundred years ago, show what purport to be Arabic scripts or inscriptions, but in fact are gibberish, since the artisan producing such objects is often illiterate, certainly ignorant of Classical Arabic, and the complex rules of Arabic calligraphy.

Let me summarize: Does the frieze represent actual writing? The answer is yes. Is the writing in any sense legible? Here again, the answer is yes. It is not easily legible, but nor are all the stylized inscriptions in, for instance, the Dome of the Rock. It is simply a feature of Islamic calligraphic art, and in this case Gérôme was not inventing the writing. But even if Gérôme had invented the inscriptions, what conclusion would follow? Only that Gérôme did not know Arabic. But neither does Nochlin. If Gérôme's ignorance of Arabic is an obstacle to painting about the Orient, why isn't Nochlin's ignorance of Arabic (or Turkish) an obstacle to writing about Orientalism in art?

There were at least four hundred Orientalist artists of stature, British, American, French, Italian, and German, producing thousands of works of quality and artistic merit. It does not do to generalize about artists from so many varied backgrounds, each with his cultural, and above all, aesthetic perspectives, in the calumniating fashion that Nochlin does. It is Nochlin who sees the entire Orient defamed in one painting. It is her generalizations and tendentious readings that are offensive. It is she who is degrading the Orient by such claims, not the artists she misreads and exploits for tendentious ends. These artists often portrayed the essential dignity of that non-European Other, the Oriental.

IBN WARRAQ
Ibn Warraq is a writer and debater. The article is a revised chapter from his study Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, to be published in September 2007 by Prometheus Books.

ஜெர்மனி மறுபடியும்- பெர்லின் சுவர் மட்டுமா வேண்டும், ஹிட்லரின் ராஜ்யமும்தான்

பெர்லின் சுவரும் சோசலிசமும் வேண்டும் என்று ஜெர்மனியில் கிழக்கு ஜெர்மனியின் முன்னாள் பிரஜைகள் விரும்புவதைப் பற்றிப் பதிந்தேன். வேலை செய்யாமல் சம்பளம் என்பது யாருக்குத் தான் பிடிக்காது? வங்காளடததில் கணக்கர்களை, அரசாங்க ஊழியர்களை, சிபிஎம் தொழிற்சங்க ஆர்வலர்களைக் கேட்டால் பெரும் காவியமே எழுதுவார்கள்- எப்படி அதைச் சாதிப்பது என்று.
இங்கே பார்த்தால் அதை விட அதிசயமாக ஜெர்மனியர் இன்னொன்று சொல்கிறார்கள்- ஆனால் அனேகமாக இவர்களெல்லாம் கிழவர்கள்.
அதான், ஹிடலர் வந்தால் நல்லாயிருக்கும் என்று புலம்பல். நானே பார்த்திருக்கிறேன் தமிழ் நாட்டில். சில கிழவர்களெல்லாம், பிரிட்டிஷ் காரன் தாய்யா சரியா ஆட்சி பண்ணான். அவனே திரும்ப வந்தால் தேவலாம் என்று சொன்னவர்களை எல்லாம் கொஞ்சம் நிறையவே பார்த்திருக்கிறேன். இதில் பிரிட்டிஷ்காரன் காலத்தில் சிறு பையன்களாக இருந்த சில மகாஜனங்களும் அடக்கம்.
சூ.கா
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331014136-103532,00.html
_____________________________________________________

One in four see positive side of Nazis, poll finds
· Older Germans more accepting of regime · TV newsreader sacked over comments on familyKate Connolly in BerlinFriday October 19, 2007
GuardianA quarter of Germans believe aspects of the Nazi era were positive, according to a poll published after a dispute about the Nazis and their attitude towards the family.
Asked whether National Socialism was wholly negative or had some good points, 25% of respondents to the Forsa institute poll said yes, while 70% said no.
The poll was published in Stern magazine to accompany an essay on "Why every fourth German still believes National Socialism had its good sides". It comes after a debate sparked last month by a television presenter who said the Nazis' attitude towards the family had been positive. Eva Herman, 48, was sacked from her role as a newsreader by public broadcaster NDR after her comments prompted an outcry.
Germans were still deeply insecure about how to view their past, according to the magazine. The older the respondents, the higher their acceptance was of the Nazi regime. Of the over 60s, 37% answered positively.
"It would appear that a lot of people think like Eva Herman, but most of them don't say it into a microphone," the magazine wrote.
The poll has drawn sharp criticism from the Central Council of Jews. Its vice president, Dieter Graumann, called it a warning sign and said it was "ugly, disastrous and it makes me sad and angry".
"It shows just what a tall task schools (and) youth workers ... have in front of them," he told German news website Netzeitung.
Volker Beck of the Greens said it was a slap in the face to those who thought Germans were confronted excessively with the Nazi past.
"This poll shows those who repeatedly criticise schools for teaching too much about the Third Reich are wrong," he said. "It is particularly alarming that younger people are increasingly positive about National Socialism."
Herman was quoted as saying that although there was "much that was very bad, for example Adolf Hitler," the Nazi era produced good things, "such as the high regard for the mother". What makes her remarks particularly taboo in German society is that the Nazis awarded mothers who produced large families medals of honour for their contribution to increasing the aryan race.
The magazine said Germans suppressed the extent to which Nazi-era laws and legacies shaped their lives, and its condemnation of Herman was hypocritical. "Hitler still reigns," it wrote, highlighting existing laws governing everything from chimney sweeps to maternity leave, which originated in the Nazi era.
"Hitler left the world much more than Auschwitz and the autobahns, but it's something people gladly forget or suppress," it wrote.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

சூர்யக்காற்று

November 14, 2007

தென்கிழக்கு ஆசியாவின் சீனப் பெரிய மனிதர்கள்

November 08, 2007

உள்ளும் வெளியும்- காலனியக் கடப்பு நிலை

Being inside and outside simultaneously

What's normal, anyway?

எட்வர்ட் சயிததின் வரலாற்றுத் திரிப்புகள்-

Said Falsifies the Past

எட்வர்ட் சையித் மற்றவர்களைச் சொன்ன குறைகளெல்லாம் அவருக்கும் பொருந்தும்ம்

Tendentious Theory Blocks our View

ஜெர்மனி மறுபடியும்- பெர்லின் சுவர் மட்டுமா வேண்டும், ஹிட்லரின் ராஜ்யமும்தான்

வலைத் தளங்கள்

Blog Archive