The Flood
by Robert Lee Frost
Blood has been harder to dam back than water.
Just when we think we have it impounded safe
Behind new barrier walls (and let it chafe!),
It breaks away in some new kind of slaughter.
We choose to say it is let loose by the devil;
But power of blood itself releases blood.
It goes by might of being such a flood
Held high at so unnatural a level.
It will have outlet, brave and not so brave.
weapons of war and implements of peace
Are but the points at which it finds release.
And now it is once more the tidal wave
That when it has swept by leaves summits stained.
Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.
Update: This poem was published in 1928, in a collection called West-Running Brook.
I believe it is a response to the great Misssippi River flood of 1927, which killed and displaced thousands of people -- including, again, many African Americans. Herbert Hoover, one of the most incompetent Presidents in U.S. history, supervised the rescue efforts. His betrayal of African American victims of the flood led blacks to leave the Republican party, and may have changed the face of American politics.
Here is a PBS timeline detailing the events. The racial nastiness of the era makes this week's FEMA failure seem almost small.
With "blood," I think Frost is in some sense referring to the ugly human politics that came with (and followed) the disaster.
Race and Hurricane Katrina: two questions
Though I haven't written about it this week, I've been watching and reading the coverage of Katrina in New Orleans with a mixture of awe and horror.
Two quick thoughts for discussion.
First, have you noticed that numerous articles refer to the affected region as "third world" in its devastation? (Example: CNN) I always cringe when I read that.
But it's worth thinking about. Remember how after the Bombay flood last month (37.1 inches in 24 hours), there were numerous articles in the Indian media lamenting the city's inability to keep things running smoothly? Well, it doesn't just happen in India. Natural disasters happen to everyone; it isn't something to be embarrassed about. (Still, I wish they wouldn't use poorer parts of the world as a benchmark for the scale of the disaster.)
Here the authorities had access to good predictions for the storm, and were able to execute a large-scale evacuation of part of the population quickly. It would be great if monsoon rains could be predicted with as much accuracy. Does anyone know the science behind this? Why did no one have any idea that 37 inches of rain were about to hit the city of Bombay last month?
[Update: The fact that they had good predictions makes it all the more unbelievable that the post-Hurrican evacuation of New Orleans has been so inept.]
It is also worth considering that the area in question with Katrina is much less densely populated than Bombay (1.5 million people in the entire New Orleans metro area; compare to 20 million+ in greater Bombay).
The second issue circles around race within the U.S. If you watch the news footage of the post-Katrina rescue operations, you'll notice again and again that the people being rescued seem to be overwhelmingly African American.
There could be any number of reasons for this. One is, it's quite plausible to infer that more African Americans ignored or didn't get the message about the mandatory evacuation before the storm. Some folks may not have had the physical means to get out (i.e., a car & a credit card), or a place to go. Another factor might be topography: it's possible that many black neighborhoods are in low-lying areas (though I admit I don't know the New Orleans area very well). And finally, one shouldn't forget that in terms of sheer demographics, these areas as a whole have large African American populations.
I'm not trying to imply racism is afoot. Only this: the fact that blacks seem to have been disproportionately affected by this tragedy reminds us of the inequities that existed before the Hurricane happened. When we see folks being airlifted to safety, it should probably be on our minds that they were the ones who lived in the most vulnerable housing to begin with, and were also in many cases unable to think of leaving it behind.
I wish the mainstream media would take notice of this issue; thus far, though, I haven't seen anyone make reference to it. (Maybe after the shock of the storm dies down.) [Update: see the Slate article linked in the Comments below]
The mayor of Biloxi, Mississippi called Katrina "Our Tsunami", and judging from the pictures of Biloxi and Jackson, he may be right (though, as massive as the disaster is, it is still much smaller in scale than the Tsunami, which caused huge damage in eight countries, and left nearly 1000 times more people dead). But as with the tsunami, there is here a story behind the tragedy -- a pattern of ongoing suffering that existed before the storm -- that people aren't talking about.
* * *
This Boing Boing story doesn't help matters. Apparently, in some AFP photo captions, blacks who are carrying goods retrieved from closed or damaged stores are referred to as "looting," while white people doing the same thing are described "finding" the goods they're carrying.
Two quick thoughts for discussion.
First, have you noticed that numerous articles refer to the affected region as "third world" in its devastation? (Example: CNN) I always cringe when I read that.
But it's worth thinking about. Remember how after the Bombay flood last month (37.1 inches in 24 hours), there were numerous articles in the Indian media lamenting the city's inability to keep things running smoothly? Well, it doesn't just happen in India. Natural disasters happen to everyone; it isn't something to be embarrassed about. (Still, I wish they wouldn't use poorer parts of the world as a benchmark for the scale of the disaster.)
Here the authorities had access to good predictions for the storm, and were able to execute a large-scale evacuation of part of the population quickly. It would be great if monsoon rains could be predicted with as much accuracy. Does anyone know the science behind this? Why did no one have any idea that 37 inches of rain were about to hit the city of Bombay last month?
[Update: The fact that they had good predictions makes it all the more unbelievable that the post-Hurrican evacuation of New Orleans has been so inept.]
It is also worth considering that the area in question with Katrina is much less densely populated than Bombay (1.5 million people in the entire New Orleans metro area; compare to 20 million+ in greater Bombay).
The second issue circles around race within the U.S. If you watch the news footage of the post-Katrina rescue operations, you'll notice again and again that the people being rescued seem to be overwhelmingly African American.
There could be any number of reasons for this. One is, it's quite plausible to infer that more African Americans ignored or didn't get the message about the mandatory evacuation before the storm. Some folks may not have had the physical means to get out (i.e., a car & a credit card), or a place to go. Another factor might be topography: it's possible that many black neighborhoods are in low-lying areas (though I admit I don't know the New Orleans area very well). And finally, one shouldn't forget that in terms of sheer demographics, these areas as a whole have large African American populations.
I'm not trying to imply racism is afoot. Only this: the fact that blacks seem to have been disproportionately affected by this tragedy reminds us of the inequities that existed before the Hurricane happened. When we see folks being airlifted to safety, it should probably be on our minds that they were the ones who lived in the most vulnerable housing to begin with, and were also in many cases unable to think of leaving it behind.
I wish the mainstream media would take notice of this issue; thus far, though, I haven't seen anyone make reference to it. (Maybe after the shock of the storm dies down.) [Update: see the Slate article linked in the Comments below]
The mayor of Biloxi, Mississippi called Katrina "Our Tsunami", and judging from the pictures of Biloxi and Jackson, he may be right (though, as massive as the disaster is, it is still much smaller in scale than the Tsunami, which caused huge damage in eight countries, and left nearly 1000 times more people dead). But as with the tsunami, there is here a story behind the tragedy -- a pattern of ongoing suffering that existed before the storm -- that people aren't talking about.
* * *
This Boing Boing story doesn't help matters. Apparently, in some AFP photo captions, blacks who are carrying goods retrieved from closed or damaged stores are referred to as "looting," while white people doing the same thing are described "finding" the goods they're carrying.
Curry, the 'Glorious Bastard' (A Biography)
Via Sonia Faleiro, a review of Curry: A Biography at the Guardian. The key paragraph for my purposes might be this one:
This is generally right -- people generally misuse the word 'curry' -- though it's not strictly true that Indians never use the word.
Manish had an excellent and informative rant about this in May, clarifying what "curry" (or kari) is in north Indian cooking:
But back to Lizzie Collingham's Curry book. The book definitely looks like fun, though from Kathyrn Hughes' review I'm a little confused as to whether it's really all about curry, or Indian culinary hybridity in general:
Tea? Portuguese hygiene? It's all sort of relevant -- in kind of an irrelevant way.
One question I have from this is exactly what the origin of the word "curry" is. Many people have suggested it's really a British word (or a British usage imported into Hindi), but doesn't it originally come from an Indian language?
(My own instinct is that it might have something to do with the word kadai -- the pot in which it's cooked. But I am hardly an expert on the subject.)
This Indian food site has a different theory:
The brilliant Hobson-Jobson entry for "Curry" also starts the etymology with Tamil, though they don't mention anything about Kadhi leaves. However, they do find a way to bring in, with characteristic randomness, Richard the Lionhearted:
Two quick thoughts. First, I'm always amazed as to how much lingering Portuguese influence there is on subcontinental culture -- both the old Hobson-Jobson entry on 'curry' and the Collingham book on the same subject testify to it. (Maybe the topic for another post.) And secondly, Richard the Lionhearted? In an entry on "curry"? These guys were out of their minds.
The Hobson-Jobson definition of "Mussalla" is much briefer, but also interesting. According Yule and Burnell, the word comes from the Arabic Musalih: "things for the good of, or things or affairs conducive to good."
It's all good.
What this smart little book does is unpick some of the pathways by which various meats, fish, fruits and rice came together at particular moments in history to produce, say, a lamb pasanda or even our own particular favourite, chicken tikka masala ("curry", it turns out, is a generic term that Indians themselves would never use). In the process she neatly undercuts our fantasies about origins, beginnings, and authenticity, the possibility that there is a place somewhere high up in the hills where you can still taste these dishes in their original form. For Indian cuisine, it turns out, has always been a glorious bastard, a repository of whatever bits and pieces come to hand.
This is generally right -- people generally misuse the word 'curry' -- though it's not strictly true that Indians never use the word.
Manish had an excellent and informative rant about this in May, clarifying what "curry" (or kari) is in north Indian cooking:
Let’s put that trope out of its British Raj-induced misery. Indian dishes as a whole are not called curry. They’re called sabzi or khana in Hindi, or just plain Indian food. In Punjabi cooking, curry is one specific dish: a thick yellow sauce made with yogurt and garbanzo flour, spiced with turmeric and eaten with rice. Some stir munchies like vadas, chicken or mutton into this base.
Calling all Indian food ‘curry’ is like calling all American food ‘Jello’: it’s nonsensical. If you tell me, ‘Let’s get some curry!’ and then order saag paneer, I’m going to laugh at you. Loudly.
But back to Lizzie Collingham's Curry book. The book definitely looks like fun, though from Kathyrn Hughes' review I'm a little confused as to whether it's really all about curry, or Indian culinary hybridity in general:
In 17th-century Goa, for instance, it was the visiting Portuguese who taught the local Indians how to make the exquisite egg and milk-based sweets that have since become part of the fabric of eating on the western seaboard. By way of reciprocity, the natives taught the Portuguese how to be clean: not previously known for their personal daintiness, the settling Europeans started lathering up and changing their pants with a regularity that amazed newcomers as they reached for yet one more helping of bebinka, a delicious mix of coconut milk, eggs and hunks of palm sugar.
There again, 300 years later, it comes as a shock to learn that Indians of all castes were indifferent to the pleasures of tea-drinking until the beginning of the 20th century. It was only when their British rulers insisted that they try it for themselves, sweetening the experience with the promise of all the money that was to be made from this new cash crop, that the subcontinent gave itself over to the cup that cheers.
Tea? Portuguese hygiene? It's all sort of relevant -- in kind of an irrelevant way.
One question I have from this is exactly what the origin of the word "curry" is. Many people have suggested it's really a British word (or a British usage imported into Hindi), but doesn't it originally come from an Indian language?
(My own instinct is that it might have something to do with the word kadai -- the pot in which it's cooked. But I am hardly an expert on the subject.)
This Indian food site has a different theory:
Curry is an English word most probably derived from the South Indian word Kaikaari. Kaikaari, or its shortened version Kaari, meant vegetables cooked with spices and a dash of coconut. It may have become the symbolic British word for Indian dishes that could be eaten with rice.
In India curry means gravy.
In America many believe curry is an Indian spice. Curry powder is sold in many supermarkets. Many dishes in America call for curry powder, which is actually a blend of spices (mainly garam masala) that is mixed with coriander powder and turmeric. In India, Indians would be confused if you mentioned curry powder.
There is a plant, however, that has leaves that are called curry leaves or in Hindi meetha neem or Kadhi leaves. They look like miniature lemon leaves and grow wild in most forest regions of India and are used as a seasoning.
The brilliant Hobson-Jobson entry for "Curry" also starts the etymology with Tamil, though they don't mention anything about Kadhi leaves. However, they do find a way to bring in, with characteristic randomness, Richard the Lionhearted:
In the East the staple food consists of some cereal, either (as in North India) in the form of flour baked into unleavened cakes, or boiled in the grain, as rice is. Such food having little taste, some small quantity of a much more savoury preparation is added as a relish, or 'kitchen,' to use the phrase of our forefathers. And this is in fact the proper office of curry in native diet. It consists of meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric; and a little of this gives a flavour to a large mess of rice. The word is Tamil kari, i.e. 'sauce'; [kari, v. 'to eat by biting']. The Canarese form karil was that adopted by the Portuguese, and is still in use at Goa. It is remarkable in how many countries a similar dish is habitual; pilao is the analogous mess in Persia, and kuskussu in Algeria; in Egypt a dish well known as ruzz mufalfal , or "peppered rice." In England the proportions of rice and "kitchen" are usually reversed, so that the latter is made to constitute the bulk of the dish.
It is possible, however, that the kind of curry used by Europeans and Mahommedans is not of purely Indian origin, but has come down from the spiced cookery of medieval Europe and Western Asia. The medieval spiced dishes in question were even coloured like curry. Turmeric, indeed, called by Garcia de Orta, Indian saffron, was yet unknown in Europe, but it was represented by saffron and sandalwood. A notable incident occurs in the old English poem of King Richard, wherein the Lion-heart feasts on the head of a Saracen-
"soden full hastily
With powder and with spysory,
And with saffron of good colour."
Moreover, there is hardly room for doubt that capsicum or red pepper (see CHILLY) was introduced into India by the Portuguese and this spice constitutes the most important ingredient in modern curries.
Two quick thoughts. First, I'm always amazed as to how much lingering Portuguese influence there is on subcontinental culture -- both the old Hobson-Jobson entry on 'curry' and the Collingham book on the same subject testify to it. (Maybe the topic for another post.) And secondly, Richard the Lionhearted? In an entry on "curry"? These guys were out of their minds.
The Hobson-Jobson definition of "Mussalla" is much briefer, but also interesting. According Yule and Burnell, the word comes from the Arabic Musalih: "things for the good of, or things or affairs conducive to good."
It's all good.
Broken Flowers: Fun With the Reviewers
On Friday we went to see the new Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, and I was struck, first of all, that Bill Murray is playing exactly the same character he played in Lost in Translation. It's a little sad that a veteran art filmmaker like Jarmusch is essentially doing a sequel to a Sofia Coppola movie, with a wacky Ethiopian neighbor and his Ethiopiques CDs adding in some masala cultural exoticism. I was flipping through the reviews, and amazed by the amount of B.S., but I can't get up the energy to 'fisk' them thoroughly. So today I am decoding just the one line summaries of reviews of the film on Rotten Tomatoes. Sometimes reviewers find nicer sounding language that masks what they really feel about a movie. The masks are particularly impressive on a film like this -- an extremely slow-paced, abstract (largely plotless) art film that is kept afloat by Bill Murray's natural affability. I'm not saying I didn't like it (I enjoyed it "in my own way"), but rather that the reviewers are a little desperate to find something to say.
For instance, take this one-liner from Variety:
1. "With Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch's sly, touching new film, Bill Murray reaffirms his status as the quietest comic actor in movies today."
Translation: Bill Murray repeats himself! He phoned this one in.
2. "Jarmusch doesn't just let the audience be a fly on the wall; it's more like the whole ant and the magnifying glass experiment on a hot summer day. "
Translation: You will be bored out of your skull, readers! I sure was. I kept hoping that the screen would catch fire, so I could get my money back. And the movie was so boring I was able to come up with some pretty outrageous metaphors to describe the precise texture of my colossal disinterest.
3. "Admittedly, some may find the movie's pacing a bit self-indulgent and its sense of humor more than a little odd, but this rewarding, cinematic voyage of self-discovery also provides some real food for thought."
Translation: I didn't get this movie, it made no sense to me, but maybe there was something I missed. I'm a little slow when it comes to understanding challenging films, you see. I used to write for the Sports Section, but they transferred me.
4. "A wonderful collaboration between two unique talents, Broken Flowers perhaps isn’t for casual mainstream tastes, but it speaks eloquently to what’s broken in all of us."
Translation: No translation possible. The phrase "it speaks eloquently to what's broken in all of us" is the purest and most perfect nonsense. Any reviewer with a tendency to such sublime meaninglessness is clearly getting paid by the word.
5. ""Exhibits a confident delicacy and palpable, mature sadness."
Translation: Depressing as hell. Don't forget to bring your Prozac.
6. "Jarmusch isn’t blessed with as rounded a social collision as Mystery Train and Night on Earth. But it’s the best of his post-Dead Man output."
Two translations: a. I have watched more movies than you, and therefore I can tell you that Jim Jarmusch's post-Dead Man output has generally been a bit sub-par. And b) while watching this film you'll wish you were sixteen again, out after curfew, watching Night On Earth at the Biograph Theater in Georgetown... Sigh, we were young then, weren't we?
7. "As with previous Jarmusch rambles, Broken Flowers risks getting overpowered by aridity and drift. That it barely avoids such a fate can be credited entirely to Murray's graceful empathy with loss and regret."
Translation: I hated this film, hated hated hated it. But Jim Jarmusch is widely thought of as a genius, so I have to find some redeeming value in the film if I want to keep this job.
8. "Take this trip with him and chances are, you'll find the journey increasingly funny and touching."
Translation: Actually Desson Thomson of the Washington Post thought he was reviewing March of the Penguins. Wrong film.
9. "Audiences will laugh, mainly to prove they're awake, but the humor is pretty thin."
Translation: No translation necessary!!! Finally, an honest reviewer. Kyle Smith of the New York Post, you are the only honest reviewer in Babylon. I send you an honorary ripe tomato.
Exhibitionists vs. Eccentrics
Tunku Varadarajan has a kind of critique of obituaries that misuse the word 'eccentric' in the Wall Street Journal. It leads him to make a distinction between 'eccentricity' and 'exhibitionism' that is entertaining if not actually true:
It's in response to a series of obituaries of 'eccentric developer magnate' Abe Hirschfeld, who died last week. The titles of the Hirschfeld obituaries support Varadarajan's point about the word eccentric: see the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Houston Chronicle... and the list could go on.
Anyway, I like Varadarajan's point about the prevalence of 'exhibitionism' in America's immigrant culture, though the distinction he's making may not really be true. (Americans love a good nutty celebrity, though it's true that Madonna now lives in England.)
And needless to say, as a blogger I fully support and encourage both exhibitionism and eccentricity, and think they complement each other nicely.
That said, and with readers' permission, I will progress to a broad but defensible generalization. Americans . . . tend to make very good exhibitionists. By contrast, and famously, the British make much the better eccentrics. Americans, in fact, are not very good at eccentricity, just as Brits are clumsy at exhibitionism. (This is not to suggest that no Britons attempt public display. Some--mainly professional soccer players--do, but they seldom manage to pull it off with style.)
What is the wellspring of American exhibitionism? Life in this country--large and competitive--is largely about calling attention to oneself, it matters not in how vulgar (and noisy) a way. Ours is a loud culture: This is perhaps because, at the subsistence or immigrant level (or at the level of folk memory), most start in crowded rooms and one has to shout to be heard, or to get fed. In a society of immigrants, "outsiders" find that they can become "insiders" by extra oomph. The struggle for integration is an especially American drama and the immigrant knows that he may need braggadocio.
It's in response to a series of obituaries of 'eccentric developer magnate' Abe Hirschfeld, who died last week. The titles of the Hirschfeld obituaries support Varadarajan's point about the word eccentric: see the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Houston Chronicle... and the list could go on.
Anyway, I like Varadarajan's point about the prevalence of 'exhibitionism' in America's immigrant culture, though the distinction he's making may not really be true. (Americans love a good nutty celebrity, though it's true that Madonna now lives in England.)
And needless to say, as a blogger I fully support and encourage both exhibitionism and eccentricity, and think they complement each other nicely.
"Fear presides over these memories": Philip Roth's The Plot Against America
[cross-posted at The Valve]
I have two responses to Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which are overlapping but distinct. One is my admiration for Roth's allegory for today's America. Alongside the entertaining (and sometimes uncanny) comparison between the real President Bush and the imagined President Lindbergh, there is a distinctly American politics of fear that maps quite directly to the crackdown on Muslim immigrants taking place in the U.S. today under the USA Patriot Act.
Secondly, I am surprised at how closely this book mirrors some of the issues in my dissertation/book project on secularism. In the second half of this post, I'll briefly compare Roth's novel to George Eliot's 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, which I think of as the most serious and nuanced exploration the idea of "Jewishness" as a racial/religious category written during the Victorian era. In both novels I see a logic of what I call "Jewish recognition" in play. Jewish recognition is a way of identifying (and stigmatizing) a religious minority, but it also, I find, operates within the community through a specifically Jewish version of DuBois-ian double-consciousness.
1. The Politics of Fear
I won't give away the ending of Roth's novel (indeed, I'll ignore it), but suffice it to say that one of the most intriguing subtleties of The Plot Against America is the ominous change in American society that doesn't quite amount to fascism. Roth's two clever inventions -- government programs created by the fictitious Lindbergh presidency -- are the "Office of American Absorption" and a new "Homestead Act of 1942." Both are voluntary programs, designed to assimilate specifically Jewish immigrants into mainstream American society. Both have the whiff of Nazism, without its ugly sting. The word "absorption" is particularly terrifying, as it suggests deracination by force.
But as I mentioned, the two programs instituted by the Lindbergh Presidency are voluntary ones, and the Jewish community in Roth's novel is divided internally about whether to support them. Many do, and they find good reasons for doing so (aren't the perils of ghettoization real, after all? isn't the difference between "assimilation" and "absorption" trivial?). Others -- like "Philip's" father -- don't support the measures, and find themselves constantly waiting for the other shoe to fall. They seem paranoid, and the expectation is that they are right to be so.
However, in Roth's novel, the excesses conjured by the specter of a Nazi sympathizer as an American President never quite materialize. Which is a little like the present moment and the maddening Presidency of George W. Bush, is it not? We have gotten somewhat used to some anti-democratic practices -- specifically the routine use of torture (or something approximating it) against non-citizens in detention facilities located offshore. We have also gotten used to aggressive pursuit of radicalized Muslims; the government has a policy of aggressive deportation against Muslim non-citizens in the U.S., subjecting large segments of the immigrant population in the U.S. to life in a state of fear.
As with Roth's novel, there is nothing illegal about what the government has done and is doing with these deportations. In every case, there has been shown to be something amiss with the deportee's immigration status -- an overstayed student visa being the most common culprit. But take the case of two teenager girls in New York who were detained this past April (see this Times story). The FBI held them for six weeks in detention while questioning them, based on a) an essay one of the girls had written for a school assignment, and b) some statements one of the girls had made in an Islamic chatroom. It took six weeks in a holding cell, but it was finally decided that, chatroom Jihad notwithstanding, they weren't terrorists. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi girl (Tashnuba) and her family were all deported in June. They had been in the U.S. for thirteen years (thirteen out of Tashnuba's sixteen years), but they were illegal, so... what's there to complain about? (I blogged about it here.)
As I said, the deportation of this family cannot be construed as 'wrong', but the conditions in which it occurred raise the question of whether the deportation is itself a form of punishment for Tashnuba's strong views on Islam. Either way, the FBI's extremely aggressive tactics produce a climate of fear in the immigrant community; people have to watch what they say, or run the risk of detainment and/or deportation.
To me, it all seems quite similar to the paranoid vision of America in Roth's novel.
2. Secularism and Jewish Recognition
The debate within the Jewish community over assimilation is as important in George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda as it is in Roth's Plot Against America. It is most intense in the latter chapters of the novel in the long dialogues between the devout Mordecai and the novel's eponymous hero, who only discovers that he's of Jewish descent after having been raised as an "English" (Christian) gentleman.
The novel makes a statement against assimilationism and ends with Deronda leaving England (for Palestine) to do nation-building work on behalf of European Jewry as a whole. Some aspects of Eliot's approach to Judaism now seem to be a little naive, but the framing of Deronda's choice, as one that is playing out within ethnic and religious groups as well as in the mainstream, is both sensitive and prescient. Ultimately, the demonization of the English Jews -- as seen in the anti-Semitism of Dickens' Fagin, or Trollope's "Prime Minister" -- is often accompanied by a measure of complicity amongst members of the targeted community. Eliot's Deronda is secularized and acculturated to English, liberal norms by dint of his gentlemanly upbringing in the Mallinger household. The idea that he of all people might resist absorption on principled lines upends the majority's assumption that English Jews will consent to be assimilated.
In my chapter on Eliot, I make a great deal of hay out of the following passage from the novel. Deronda is in a secondhand clothing store in the Jewish neighborhood in London. He is still unclear about his parentage, though curiosity has drawn him to develop an interest in the Jews and Judaism. The proprietor of the shop (Mordecai) grabs him by the shoulder:
I'll spare you the nitty gritties, and say only that I'm interested in Deronda's physical response to being recognized as a Jew before he has fully recognized it in himself. I'm particularly intrigued by Eliot's phrasing here -- the word "coloured" as a figure of speech for a blush, which I see as referring to Judaism as a matter of blood (racial difference) without actually saying so. I'm also intrigued by the turn in the last paragraph to Deronda's envisioning "some high dignitary" -- the English gentleman's superego, when he is merely in the presence of the considerably less 'dignitaried' Mordecai. When one is embarrassed by being recognized as a member of a stigmatized group, the fear and humiliation is oriented to the scrutiny of the presumably Christian master, not to the stigmatized group itself.
There are scenes of Jewish recognition in The Plot Against America as well, especially in the "Loudmouth Jew" chapter early in the novel. In the scene that I found really disturbing, the Roth family are away from their predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Newark, NJ, on a trip to the nation's capital. Everywhere they go, they are seemingly recognized as Jews by mainstream/Christian Americans, and it's often unclear what is behind it. Perhaps it's partly the name "Roth," though if so one wonders why the hotel that eventually turns them out ever booked them to begin with. It might also be in their appearance; one of the most painful passages in the entire book is the nine-year old Philip's recognition that both he and his mother definitely "look Jewish":
Philip has learned to see himself the way non-Jews see him. With that realization, however, comes pain, as implicit in the capacity for Jewish recognition is the assumption that the difference that is suddenly unmistakable to Philip is something to be ashamed of.
This brings us back to the scene where the Roth family visit the Washington Monument, and get into an argument with a stranger who admires President Lindbergh:
The moment of recognition is physical again; the stranger looks over the Roth family for a hard minute before drawing a conclusion. It's interesting to me that Roth's narrator here disregards what the stranger probably sees, and gives us his own 'look' at the family -- with tenderness and sympathy rather then prejudice. However, when the stranger finally throws down his slur, he doesn't single out the differences in the Roth's family's appearance, but rather the "loudmouth" voice. It's the voice he can't stand; he doesn't quite know how to shut it up.
I have two responses to Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which are overlapping but distinct. One is my admiration for Roth's allegory for today's America. Alongside the entertaining (and sometimes uncanny) comparison between the real President Bush and the imagined President Lindbergh, there is a distinctly American politics of fear that maps quite directly to the crackdown on Muslim immigrants taking place in the U.S. today under the USA Patriot Act.
Secondly, I am surprised at how closely this book mirrors some of the issues in my dissertation/book project on secularism. In the second half of this post, I'll briefly compare Roth's novel to George Eliot's 1876 novel Daniel Deronda, which I think of as the most serious and nuanced exploration the idea of "Jewishness" as a racial/religious category written during the Victorian era. In both novels I see a logic of what I call "Jewish recognition" in play. Jewish recognition is a way of identifying (and stigmatizing) a religious minority, but it also, I find, operates within the community through a specifically Jewish version of DuBois-ian double-consciousness.
1. The Politics of Fear
I won't give away the ending of Roth's novel (indeed, I'll ignore it), but suffice it to say that one of the most intriguing subtleties of The Plot Against America is the ominous change in American society that doesn't quite amount to fascism. Roth's two clever inventions -- government programs created by the fictitious Lindbergh presidency -- are the "Office of American Absorption" and a new "Homestead Act of 1942." Both are voluntary programs, designed to assimilate specifically Jewish immigrants into mainstream American society. Both have the whiff of Nazism, without its ugly sting. The word "absorption" is particularly terrifying, as it suggests deracination by force.
But as I mentioned, the two programs instituted by the Lindbergh Presidency are voluntary ones, and the Jewish community in Roth's novel is divided internally about whether to support them. Many do, and they find good reasons for doing so (aren't the perils of ghettoization real, after all? isn't the difference between "assimilation" and "absorption" trivial?). Others -- like "Philip's" father -- don't support the measures, and find themselves constantly waiting for the other shoe to fall. They seem paranoid, and the expectation is that they are right to be so.
However, in Roth's novel, the excesses conjured by the specter of a Nazi sympathizer as an American President never quite materialize. Which is a little like the present moment and the maddening Presidency of George W. Bush, is it not? We have gotten somewhat used to some anti-democratic practices -- specifically the routine use of torture (or something approximating it) against non-citizens in detention facilities located offshore. We have also gotten used to aggressive pursuit of radicalized Muslims; the government has a policy of aggressive deportation against Muslim non-citizens in the U.S., subjecting large segments of the immigrant population in the U.S. to life in a state of fear.
As with Roth's novel, there is nothing illegal about what the government has done and is doing with these deportations. In every case, there has been shown to be something amiss with the deportee's immigration status -- an overstayed student visa being the most common culprit. But take the case of two teenager girls in New York who were detained this past April (see this Times story). The FBI held them for six weeks in detention while questioning them, based on a) an essay one of the girls had written for a school assignment, and b) some statements one of the girls had made in an Islamic chatroom. It took six weeks in a holding cell, but it was finally decided that, chatroom Jihad notwithstanding, they weren't terrorists. Nevertheless, the Bangladeshi girl (Tashnuba) and her family were all deported in June. They had been in the U.S. for thirteen years (thirteen out of Tashnuba's sixteen years), but they were illegal, so... what's there to complain about? (I blogged about it here.)
As I said, the deportation of this family cannot be construed as 'wrong', but the conditions in which it occurred raise the question of whether the deportation is itself a form of punishment for Tashnuba's strong views on Islam. Either way, the FBI's extremely aggressive tactics produce a climate of fear in the immigrant community; people have to watch what they say, or run the risk of detainment and/or deportation.
To me, it all seems quite similar to the paranoid vision of America in Roth's novel.
2. Secularism and Jewish Recognition
The debate within the Jewish community over assimilation is as important in George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda as it is in Roth's Plot Against America. It is most intense in the latter chapters of the novel in the long dialogues between the devout Mordecai and the novel's eponymous hero, who only discovers that he's of Jewish descent after having been raised as an "English" (Christian) gentleman.
The novel makes a statement against assimilationism and ends with Deronda leaving England (for Palestine) to do nation-building work on behalf of European Jewry as a whole. Some aspects of Eliot's approach to Judaism now seem to be a little naive, but the framing of Deronda's choice, as one that is playing out within ethnic and religious groups as well as in the mainstream, is both sensitive and prescient. Ultimately, the demonization of the English Jews -- as seen in the anti-Semitism of Dickens' Fagin, or Trollope's "Prime Minister" -- is often accompanied by a measure of complicity amongst members of the targeted community. Eliot's Deronda is secularized and acculturated to English, liberal norms by dint of his gentlemanly upbringing in the Mallinger household. The idea that he of all people might resist absorption on principled lines upends the majority's assumption that English Jews will consent to be assimilated.
In my chapter on Eliot, I make a great deal of hay out of the following passage from the novel. Deronda is in a secondhand clothing store in the Jewish neighborhood in London. He is still unclear about his parentage, though curiosity has drawn him to develop an interest in the Jews and Judaism. The proprietor of the shop (Mordecai) grabs him by the shoulder:
'You are perhaps of our race?'
Deronda coloured deeply, not liking the grasp, and then answered with a slight shake of the head, 'No.' The grasp was relaxed, the hand withdrawn, the eagerness of the face collapsed into uninterested melancholy, as if some possessing spirit which had leaped into the eyes and gestures had sunk back again to the inmost recesses of the frame; and moving further off as he held out the little book, the stranger said in a tone of distant civility, 'I believe Mr Ram will be satisfied with half-a-crown, sir.'
The effect of this change on Deronda -- he afterwards smiled when he recalled it -- was oddly embarrassing and humiliating, as if some high dignitary had found him deficient and given him his congé.
I'll spare you the nitty gritties, and say only that I'm interested in Deronda's physical response to being recognized as a Jew before he has fully recognized it in himself. I'm particularly intrigued by Eliot's phrasing here -- the word "coloured" as a figure of speech for a blush, which I see as referring to Judaism as a matter of blood (racial difference) without actually saying so. I'm also intrigued by the turn in the last paragraph to Deronda's envisioning "some high dignitary" -- the English gentleman's superego, when he is merely in the presence of the considerably less 'dignitaried' Mordecai. When one is embarrassed by being recognized as a member of a stigmatized group, the fear and humiliation is oriented to the scrutiny of the presumably Christian master, not to the stigmatized group itself.
There are scenes of Jewish recognition in The Plot Against America as well, especially in the "Loudmouth Jew" chapter early in the novel. In the scene that I found really disturbing, the Roth family are away from their predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Newark, NJ, on a trip to the nation's capital. Everywhere they go, they are seemingly recognized as Jews by mainstream/Christian Americans, and it's often unclear what is behind it. Perhaps it's partly the name "Roth," though if so one wonders why the hotel that eventually turns them out ever booked them to begin with. It might also be in their appearance; one of the most painful passages in the entire book is the nine-year old Philip's recognition that both he and his mother definitely "look Jewish":
I began to pretend that I was following somebody on our bus who didn't look Jewish. It was then that I realized . . . that my mother looked Jewish. Her hair, her nose, her eyes--my mother looked unmistakably Jewish. But then so must I, who so strongly resembled her. I hadn't known.
Philip has learned to see himself the way non-Jews see him. With that realization, however, comes pain, as implicit in the capacity for Jewish recognition is the assumption that the difference that is suddenly unmistakable to Philip is something to be ashamed of.
This brings us back to the scene where the Roth family visit the Washington Monument, and get into an argument with a stranger who admires President Lindbergh:
The stranger took a long, gaping look at my father, then my mother, then Sandy, then me. And what did he see? A trim, neatly muscled, broad-chested man five feet nine inches tall, handsome in a minor key, with soft grayish-green eyes and thinning brown hair clipped close at the temples and presenting his two ears to the world a little more comically than was necessary. The woman was slender but strong and she was tidily dressed, with a lock of her wavy dark hair over one eyebrow and roundish cheeks a little rouged and a prominent nose and chunky arms and shapely legs and slimp hips and the lively eyes of a girl half her age. In both adults a surfeit of prudence and a surfeit of energy, and with the couple two boys still pretty much all soft surfaces, young children of youthful parents, keenly attentive and in good healt and incorrigible only in their optimism.
And the conclusion the stranger drew from his observations he demonstrated with a mocking movement of the head. Then, hissing noisily so as to mislead no one about his assessment of us, he returned to the elderly lady and their sightseeing party, walking slowly off with a rolling gait that seemed, along with the silhouette of his broad back, intended to register a warning. It was from there that we heard him refer to my father as a "loudmouth Jew," followed a moment later by the elderly lady declaring, "I'd give anything to slap his face." (64-65)
The moment of recognition is physical again; the stranger looks over the Roth family for a hard minute before drawing a conclusion. It's interesting to me that Roth's narrator here disregards what the stranger probably sees, and gives us his own 'look' at the family -- with tenderness and sympathy rather then prejudice. However, when the stranger finally throws down his slur, he doesn't single out the differences in the Roth's family's appearance, but rather the "loudmouth" voice. It's the voice he can't stand; he doesn't quite know how to shut it up.
The Tail End of Long Island on Fire
Sadly, our Long Island summer is coming to an end. I might have something to say about what life has been like out here soon (hint: restful), but for now I can point people to some photos on Flickr. I have also added the "Flickr Badge" thingie to the sidebar. It seems to be showing up on everyone's blogs, and who am I to miss out on a blogging fad?
The Simoqin Prophecies, by Samit Basu
We have a Sci-Fi writer in our midst.
I knew vaguely that Samit Basu had published a novel in India, but didn't know much about it.
It turns out, The Simoqin Prophecies has been released here in the U.S. I found my copy (purchased yesterday) at a Borders on Long Island. It's a $7.99 paperback, so Sci-Fi fans and Indian literature fans really have no excuse for not picking it up!
I'm sure everyone is saying this, and it might well annoy Samit to say this, but I think the simplest publishing tag-line/blurb for this might be the "Desi Harry Potter." Here's a snippet from an early chapter (I'm just starting the book):
See the parallels? For the record, it really, truly, doesn't bother me at all. And I have a feeling, from the chapters I've read, that the novel (and indeed, the series), is going to go off in its own very interesting directions, with humor and irreverence.
I fervently hope this book succeeds, and finds lots of readers in the U.S. (Expect another post once I've finished the book.)
A little more in the teacherly vein, since next week I'm back in the classroom:
Hm, interesting. I really think that's what's been lacking in my teaching performance in recent years. Not enough large and dangerous spellcasting!
* * * *
--Also some discussion of Samit Basu and Indian science fiction at this forum.
--And Samit posts a link to a review in the U.S. SF magazine Locus.
--Nilanjana S. Roy has been mentioning both Samit Basu and Ashok Banker as writers to watch for several months. Here's an example, at Rediff, from back in January. And here from her blog.
--I had also earlier posted on Indian speculative fiction writer Vandana Singh.
I knew vaguely that Samit Basu had published a novel in India, but didn't know much about it.
It turns out, The Simoqin Prophecies has been released here in the U.S. I found my copy (purchased yesterday) at a Borders on Long Island. It's a $7.99 paperback, so Sci-Fi fans and Indian literature fans really have no excuse for not picking it up!
I'm sure everyone is saying this, and it might well annoy Samit to say this, but I think the simplest publishing tag-line/blurb for this might be the "Desi Harry Potter." Here's a snippet from an early chapter (I'm just starting the book):
History tells us that some things never change. One of these things is: history bores a lot of people. And when young spellbinders at Enki University, Kol, were bored, they tended to do something about it.
'Put that thing away, Borphi,' said Chancellor Ombwiri, his eyes never leaving the blackboard.
The Boy Genius put the inkatapult away. How did Ombwiri do it? But then again, he was the Chancellor of Enki University, the most famous centre of magical studies in Kol, and, indeed, the world, and so he was someone whom you'd expect would have a few tricks up his sleeve. The Chancellor, however, was not using magic on this particular occasion. He was using another potent force -- habit.
See the parallels? For the record, it really, truly, doesn't bother me at all. And I have a feeling, from the chapters I've read, that the novel (and indeed, the series), is going to go off in its own very interesting directions, with humor and irreverence.
I fervently hope this book succeeds, and finds lots of readers in the U.S. (Expect another post once I've finished the book.)
A little more in the teacherly vein, since next week I'm back in the classroom:
Ombwiri's classes were always full. This was because he never stuck to his subject, and he used a large number of thrilling and usually dangerous spells in all his lectures. Explosions, injuries, love potions--all of these were standard ingredients in an Ombwiri classroom. The Chancellor never had to take attendance.
Hm, interesting. I really think that's what's been lacking in my teaching performance in recent years. Not enough large and dangerous spellcasting!
* * * *
--Also some discussion of Samit Basu and Indian science fiction at this forum.
--And Samit posts a link to a review in the U.S. SF magazine Locus.
--Nilanjana S. Roy has been mentioning both Samit Basu and Ashok Banker as writers to watch for several months. Here's an example, at Rediff, from back in January. And here from her blog.
--I had also earlier posted on Indian speculative fiction writer Vandana Singh.
Follow up on Nafisi: Paul Berman's take
I learned recently that Paul Berman has a chapter in his upcoming book Power and the Idealists on Azar Nafisi. It's too bad I hadn't gotten around to reading it before I did my blog post on her book earlier this week.
Berman, as you may know, is the author of Terror and Liberalism, and is one of the most formidable (I think) 'liberal hawks' currently out there. Like Hitchens, Berman started out as a leftist, but has in recent years turned fiercely against what he sees as inconsistencies and blind spots in the thinking of today's left-leaning intellectuals. Unlike Hitchens, however, Berman is still a Liberal, in principle and practice (I don't really know what Hitchens is anymore).
[Read this article in Dissent from 2004 to get a sense of the flavor of Paul Berman's politics on the recent Iraq War. (He supported it, and the first Gulf War.)]
I felt some frustration about the turn of the argument in Berman's Terror and Liberalism -- it seemed pretty unfair to suggest that the Romantic poets and revolutionaries of years past were somehow predecessors of today's Jihadists (how does he go from Beaudelaire and Camus to Osama Bin Laden?). Berman was himself a Leftist earlier in his life, so penalizing both the Romantic writers who celebrated violence and the Old Left (who celebrated those same Romantic writers) seems a little like (over-)compensating for a mistake.
From what I gather about the new book, it's aiming to go beyond the Terror and Liberalism argument in some ways. At least with figures like the German politician Joschka Fischer (read the section from the last chapter of Berman's book on this page), the goal is not to bury his opponents in a rhetorical jousting match so much as to tell the story of their failure with some measure of understanding and sympathy for their noble ideals.
Azar Nafisi might also be one such failed idealist, though Berman's interest in her stems from her mistaken early belief that the Islamist revolution that took place in iran 1979 -- with Communists as allies -- would somehow end up as a victory for the Iranian left. Berman's account of it draws heavily from Nafisi's narrative, except Berman injects a discussion of the various political parties and factions that is absent from Nafisi:
As I mentioned, the particular details -- like the sign at the Tehran airport -- comes out of Nafisi's book, while the political parties referenced are all introduced by Berman. (Presumably Nafisi knows their names all too well, and omitted reference to keep the focus of her story on literature, and on her experience with the women in her 'underground' literature class.)
I don't know enough to disagree with Berman's account, but I would say this: if you were a leftist in those days, agitating against the Shah, is there any doubt that you would have been willing to work with Khomeini? Given the strength and influence of the Soviet Union, the rantings of a few Mullahs probably seemed considerably less intimidating than the Shah, whose undercover police (SAVAK) was truly brutal, and whose corruption was notorious.
No one had any idea then how brutal the Islamic Republic would or could be. In this chapter, Berman faults Nafisi at times for not being quite analytical enough about the true nature and significance of the Iranian Revolution, and for writing a narrative of her life in those years focusing on her local and personal experiences rather than ideology. I think that's a little unfair; she's not trying to be Hannah Arendt. It was Nafisi's decision to abandon the tack of political resistance to the regime -- to go small, and to focus on the personal -- that allowed her to survive under it for 18 years.
That isn't to say that Berman is somehow anti-Nafisi. Actually, he depends on Reading Lolita in Tehran in this chapter far too much for that to be the case. Perhaps it might be correct to say that Berman's use of Nafisi in Power and the Idealists serves his own purposes more than it does hers.
* * * * *
More Berman: Don't Applaud the Motorcycle Diaries
Why Germany Isn't Convinced (more on Joschka Fischer)
A long exerpt from Terror and Liberalism at Prospect Magazine
My own post on an article of Berman's from Bookforum, from back in March.
Berman, as you may know, is the author of Terror and Liberalism, and is one of the most formidable (I think) 'liberal hawks' currently out there. Like Hitchens, Berman started out as a leftist, but has in recent years turned fiercely against what he sees as inconsistencies and blind spots in the thinking of today's left-leaning intellectuals. Unlike Hitchens, however, Berman is still a Liberal, in principle and practice (I don't really know what Hitchens is anymore).
[Read this article in Dissent from 2004 to get a sense of the flavor of Paul Berman's politics on the recent Iraq War. (He supported it, and the first Gulf War.)]
I felt some frustration about the turn of the argument in Berman's Terror and Liberalism -- it seemed pretty unfair to suggest that the Romantic poets and revolutionaries of years past were somehow predecessors of today's Jihadists (how does he go from Beaudelaire and Camus to Osama Bin Laden?). Berman was himself a Leftist earlier in his life, so penalizing both the Romantic writers who celebrated violence and the Old Left (who celebrated those same Romantic writers) seems a little like (over-)compensating for a mistake.
From what I gather about the new book, it's aiming to go beyond the Terror and Liberalism argument in some ways. At least with figures like the German politician Joschka Fischer (read the section from the last chapter of Berman's book on this page), the goal is not to bury his opponents in a rhetorical jousting match so much as to tell the story of their failure with some measure of understanding and sympathy for their noble ideals.
Azar Nafisi might also be one such failed idealist, though Berman's interest in her stems from her mistaken early belief that the Islamist revolution that took place in iran 1979 -- with Communists as allies -- would somehow end up as a victory for the Iranian left. Berman's account of it draws heavily from Nafisi's narrative, except Berman injects a discussion of the various political parties and factions that is absent from Nafisi:
The Tehran airport was bedecked with slogans written in black and red: DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM & ZIONISM. She took a position as a professor of literature at University of Tehran, where the Marxists were especially strong. And yet, in those early days after the Shah's overthrow, to be alive was not necessarily bliss, nor was it Heaven to be young. The revolution came to power because Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Islamists put together a broad front with the Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh) and the Marxist Fedayin Organization, together with a couple of popular organizations taht favored liberal democracy, and the mixture of mosques, Marxists, and liberals turned out to be powerful. The Shah fled for his life. But Khomeini and his mullas stood at the head of this absurdly wide United Front, and, once the mullahs had succeeded in establishing the United Front's revolutionary government, they and their Marxist allies turned against the liberals and crushed them. Then the Islamists turned against the marxists. A battle for control of the university and of course every institution of Iranian life got underway-- mullahs against Marxists and everyone else. And the Islamist victory, as it crept across the landscape, turned out to be dreadful.
As I mentioned, the particular details -- like the sign at the Tehran airport -- comes out of Nafisi's book, while the political parties referenced are all introduced by Berman. (Presumably Nafisi knows their names all too well, and omitted reference to keep the focus of her story on literature, and on her experience with the women in her 'underground' literature class.)
I don't know enough to disagree with Berman's account, but I would say this: if you were a leftist in those days, agitating against the Shah, is there any doubt that you would have been willing to work with Khomeini? Given the strength and influence of the Soviet Union, the rantings of a few Mullahs probably seemed considerably less intimidating than the Shah, whose undercover police (SAVAK) was truly brutal, and whose corruption was notorious.
No one had any idea then how brutal the Islamic Republic would or could be. In this chapter, Berman faults Nafisi at times for not being quite analytical enough about the true nature and significance of the Iranian Revolution, and for writing a narrative of her life in those years focusing on her local and personal experiences rather than ideology. I think that's a little unfair; she's not trying to be Hannah Arendt. It was Nafisi's decision to abandon the tack of political resistance to the regime -- to go small, and to focus on the personal -- that allowed her to survive under it for 18 years.
That isn't to say that Berman is somehow anti-Nafisi. Actually, he depends on Reading Lolita in Tehran in this chapter far too much for that to be the case. Perhaps it might be correct to say that Berman's use of Nafisi in Power and the Idealists serves his own purposes more than it does hers.
* * * * *
More Berman: Don't Applaud the Motorcycle Diaries
Why Germany Isn't Convinced (more on Joschka Fischer)
A long exerpt from Terror and Liberalism at Prospect Magazine
My own post on an article of Berman's from Bookforum, from back in March.
Lehigh jumps 5 slots
According to this year's U.S. News and World Report college ranking, Lehigh University jumped from the #37 university in the U.S. to #32 this year. Rock on, employer of mine...
And two South Asia-related Lehigh tidbits:
--Abhi posted on Major Raj Butani, a Lehigh alum and U.S. Army doctor recently returned from Iraq. Lehigh has a profile on him here. He has a really interesting story to tell at Yahoo India.
--Engineering Professor Arun Sengupta received international recognition for research into water purification in rural India. It's a collaborative project with the Bengal Engineering College, among others.
Nice work. Getting arsenic and other toxins out of groundwater might be even more impressive, to me at least, than jumping a couple of slots in the U.S. News Ranking. A little more on the kind of work Sengupta is doing here.
And two South Asia-related Lehigh tidbits:
--Abhi posted on Major Raj Butani, a Lehigh alum and U.S. Army doctor recently returned from Iraq. Lehigh has a profile on him here. He has a really interesting story to tell at Yahoo India.
--Engineering Professor Arun Sengupta received international recognition for research into water purification in rural India. It's a collaborative project with the Bengal Engineering College, among others.
SenGupta has developed a cheap, effective filtration system that removes arsenic from drinking groundwater. With help from students and professors at Bengal Engineering College in India, he has installed his system in 135 villages in the state of West Bengal, India.
Nice work. Getting arsenic and other toxins out of groundwater might be even more impressive, to me at least, than jumping a couple of slots in the U.S. News Ranking. A little more on the kind of work Sengupta is doing here.
The 'Pariah' Needs a 'Cummerbund': More Indian/English
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, there are many Hindustani words that have entered English as it is spoken today within India. But a number of Hindustani words have also entered general use in the main stream of the English language -- i.e., as it is spoken in Britain, North America, Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean, and Australia.
Some of the words in the following list will be well-known. Others, I hope, will be surprises:
shampoo, pajamas, pundit, cashmere, veranda, pariah, thug, cummerbund, rattan, shawl, loot, punch, jungle, khaki, calico, cushy, dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut, bungalow, bandana, toddy, chintz
This list doesn't include words like "curry," "chutney," "masala," or "chai," which are still pretty closely attached to their original Hindustani meaning even when used in English.
It's interesting that so many of the words in the above list are names for cloth or items of clothing; it tells you something about the importance of Indian textiles in the British Raj: Pajamas, cashmere, calico, rattan, shawl, dungaree, bandana, chintz. (Though it's worth noting that words denoting a type of cloth entered the English language before the start of the Raj; these cloths were being shipped to and sold in England in the early 1600s.)
I also think that architecture/housing style -- reflected in words like "bungalow" and "veranda" -- tells us something about how the British might have approached living in India a little differently. "Veranda" in particular is interesting -- the concept of the wrap-around porch did not exist, I think, in architecture in England. But it's a helpful feature in the long, hot, subcontinental summer.
It makes for a nice metaphor: the British ruled India from the Veranda. In one sense, at least, this might be literally true: for many years they moved the entire colonial administration to Simla in the summertime, to avoid the heat. Simla -- Delhi's veranda. (Perhaps a step further: The British ruled India from the Veranda, while wearing pajamas!)
As many readers may know, quite a long list of words like these were compiled in the Hobson-Jobson dictionary (Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Words; 1886), by Colonel Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell. The dictionary has actually been put online, and is freely accessible here. (Read the introduction)
One finds, from browsing, quite a number of words that seem like they are essentially straightforward Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani), which perhaps tells us something about the extent to which the British administration 'went Indian'. (However, it's worth noting that only a handful of Hobson-Jobson words finally ended up in the main stream of the English language.)
The dictionary is partly of interest because the entries are so idiosyncratic, bordering at times on the bizarre. The dictionary strongly bears the mark of the personality of its authors, which makes for a bad reference text, but fun browsing. I find the entries for words like Roc, Rum, Rupee, Ganja, Hubble-bubble, Chuckaroo, and Cuscuss particularly interesting/amusing. (Any other suggestions?)
We can also repeat the above list, with some words linking through to Hobson-Jobson:
shampoo, pajamas, pundit, cashmere, veranda, pariah, thug, cummerbund, rattan, shawl, loot, punch, jungle, khaki, calico, cushy, dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut, bungalow, bandana, toddy, chintz
Check out "Shampoo" in particular. Turns out the name comes not from the soap, but from the kind of kneading/masssage associated with it.
Think about that the next time you wash your hair, hm?
* * *
And of course, all of this was in the air again recently because of the release of the Second Revised Edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, which Manish posted about a couple of weeks ago. Of course, many of the Indian English words that have been added to the dictionary ("bindaas": uppity, rude) are still mostly "regional" -- limited mainly to India, or even particular regions in India.
Manish linked to articles about the ODE in the Times of India, the Statesman, and the Telegraph.
There was also an article about the new dictionary in a Welsh newspaper called icWales, celebrating the inclusion of the Welsh word "cwtch" (no idea how to pronounce this), which means: "1. a cupboard or cubbyhole. 2. a cuddle or hug."
Some of the words in the following list will be well-known. Others, I hope, will be surprises:
shampoo, pajamas, pundit, cashmere, veranda, pariah, thug, cummerbund, rattan, shawl, loot, punch, jungle, khaki, calico, cushy, dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut, bungalow, bandana, toddy, chintz
This list doesn't include words like "curry," "chutney," "masala," or "chai," which are still pretty closely attached to their original Hindustani meaning even when used in English.
It's interesting that so many of the words in the above list are names for cloth or items of clothing; it tells you something about the importance of Indian textiles in the British Raj: Pajamas, cashmere, calico, rattan, shawl, dungaree, bandana, chintz. (Though it's worth noting that words denoting a type of cloth entered the English language before the start of the Raj; these cloths were being shipped to and sold in England in the early 1600s.)
I also think that architecture/housing style -- reflected in words like "bungalow" and "veranda" -- tells us something about how the British might have approached living in India a little differently. "Veranda" in particular is interesting -- the concept of the wrap-around porch did not exist, I think, in architecture in England. But it's a helpful feature in the long, hot, subcontinental summer.
It makes for a nice metaphor: the British ruled India from the Veranda. In one sense, at least, this might be literally true: for many years they moved the entire colonial administration to Simla in the summertime, to avoid the heat. Simla -- Delhi's veranda. (Perhaps a step further: The British ruled India from the Veranda, while wearing pajamas!)
As many readers may know, quite a long list of words like these were compiled in the Hobson-Jobson dictionary (Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Words; 1886), by Colonel Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell. The dictionary has actually been put online, and is freely accessible here. (Read the introduction)
One finds, from browsing, quite a number of words that seem like they are essentially straightforward Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani), which perhaps tells us something about the extent to which the British administration 'went Indian'. (However, it's worth noting that only a handful of Hobson-Jobson words finally ended up in the main stream of the English language.)
The dictionary is partly of interest because the entries are so idiosyncratic, bordering at times on the bizarre. The dictionary strongly bears the mark of the personality of its authors, which makes for a bad reference text, but fun browsing. I find the entries for words like Roc, Rum, Rupee, Ganja, Hubble-bubble, Chuckaroo, and Cuscuss particularly interesting/amusing. (Any other suggestions?)
We can also repeat the above list, with some words linking through to Hobson-Jobson:
shampoo, pajamas, pundit, cashmere, veranda, pariah, thug, cummerbund, rattan, shawl, loot, punch, jungle, khaki, calico, cushy, dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut, bungalow, bandana, toddy, chintz
Check out "Shampoo" in particular. Turns out the name comes not from the soap, but from the kind of kneading/masssage associated with it.
SHAMPOO (p. 821) , v. To knead and press the muscles with the view of relieving fatigue, &c. The word has now long been familiarly used in England. The Hind. verb is champna, from the imperative of which, champo, this is most probably a corruption, as in the case of Bunow, Puckerow, &c. The process is described, though not named, by Terry, in 1616: "Taking thus their ease, they often call their Barbers, who tenderly gripe and smite their Armes and other parts of their bodies instead of exercise, to stirre the bloud. It is a pleasing wantonnesse, and much valued in these hot climes." (In Purchas, ii. 1475). The process was familiar to the Romans under the Empire, whose slaves employed in this way were styled tractator and tractatrix. [Perhaps the earliest reference to the practice is in Strabo (McCrindle, Ancient India, 72).] But with the ancients it seems to have been allied to vice, for which there is no ground that we know in the Indian custom.
1800. -- "The Sultan generally rose at break of day: after being champoed, and rubbed, he washed himself, and read the Koran for an hour." -- Beatson, War with Tippoo, p. 159.
[1810. -- "Shampoeing may be compared to a gentle kneading of the whole person, and is the same operation described by the voyagers to the Southern and Pacific ocean." -- Wilks, Hist. Sketches, Madras reprint, i. 276.]
1813. -- "There is sometimes a voluptuous- ness in the climate of India, a stillness in nature, an indescribable softness, which soothes the mind, and gives it up to the most delightful sensations: independent of the effects of opium, champoing, and other luxuries indulged in by oriental sensualists.' -- Forbes, Or. Mem. i. 35; [2nd ed. i. 25.]
Think about that the next time you wash your hair, hm?
* * *
And of course, all of this was in the air again recently because of the release of the Second Revised Edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, which Manish posted about a couple of weeks ago. Of course, many of the Indian English words that have been added to the dictionary ("bindaas": uppity, rude) are still mostly "regional" -- limited mainly to India, or even particular regions in India.
Manish linked to articles about the ODE in the Times of India, the Statesman, and the Telegraph.
There was also an article about the new dictionary in a Welsh newspaper called icWales, celebrating the inclusion of the Welsh word "cwtch" (no idea how to pronounce this), which means: "1. a cupboard or cubbyhole. 2. a cuddle or hug."
Catching up on the blogroll
It's been nearly two months since I reciprocated links. Happily, I can report they've been months during which this blog has grown a bit in readership.
I'm adding the following blogs (that link to me) to the blogroll. Many of these are newer blogs that could use visitors, so do click. Quite a number are by Indians (including people in India, NRIs, and PIOs); the Indian blogosphere seems to be growing pretty rapidly right now.
Desipundit
Indian Writing
Vikrum Sequeira
Scribbler's Delight
Vikram Arumilli
Jay/Badmash (not to be confused with the cartoonist)
Baiscope
Rajpal Sidhu
Bollywood Rumors
Naach Gaana
Suhail Kazi
Michael Higgins
Curious Gawker
Melange/Hurry to Hari
Splenderful Chronicles
Prashant Mullick
Umair Muhajir
We Who Love To Be Astonished
Jonathan Goodwin
Etcetera
Thailava
Thing, Place, Creature...
Arzan Wadia
Girish
Curry Man
Aswin
Reliable Signs
Vijayblog
Because, it's like that only
Chappan
Vishnulokam
Marginal Notations
Some blogs I'm adding don't link to me, at least, I don't think so. But they are people I discovered (or rediscovered) over the past month through Sepia Mutiny:
Mais Non
Punjabi Boy
Quizman
Gene Expression
ChaiTeaLatte
Saheli
Nina Paley
Tilotamma
Dhaavak
Saurav
Kush Tandon
Brimful
Maitri
If I missed you, please don't be embarrassed to remind me in the comments.
Update
A couple of wonderful blogs I can't believe I skipped:
Shashwati
Jabberwock
And some blogs that are new to me that I missed:
Connaissances
Sonia Faleiro
Madhu Nair
The Poetry Blog
Sri Ganesha's Tea and Book Stall
I'm adding the following blogs (that link to me) to the blogroll. Many of these are newer blogs that could use visitors, so do click. Quite a number are by Indians (including people in India, NRIs, and PIOs); the Indian blogosphere seems to be growing pretty rapidly right now.
Desipundit
Indian Writing
Vikrum Sequeira
Scribbler's Delight
Vikram Arumilli
Jay/Badmash (not to be confused with the cartoonist)
Baiscope
Rajpal Sidhu
Bollywood Rumors
Naach Gaana
Suhail Kazi
Michael Higgins
Curious Gawker
Melange/Hurry to Hari
Splenderful Chronicles
Prashant Mullick
Umair Muhajir
We Who Love To Be Astonished
Jonathan Goodwin
Etcetera
Thailava
Thing, Place, Creature...
Arzan Wadia
Girish
Curry Man
Aswin
Reliable Signs
Vijayblog
Because, it's like that only
Chappan
Vishnulokam
Marginal Notations
Some blogs I'm adding don't link to me, at least, I don't think so. But they are people I discovered (or rediscovered) over the past month through Sepia Mutiny:
Mais Non
Punjabi Boy
Quizman
Gene Expression
ChaiTeaLatte
Saheli
Nina Paley
Tilotamma
Dhaavak
Saurav
Kush Tandon
Brimful
Maitri
If I missed you, please don't be embarrassed to remind me in the comments.
Update
A couple of wonderful blogs I can't believe I skipped:
Shashwati
Jabberwock
And some blogs that are new to me that I missed:
Connaissances
Sonia Faleiro
Madhu Nair
The Poetry Blog
Sri Ganesha's Tea and Book Stall
Indian English -- Does It Exist? What Do We Call It?
I'm preparing to teach a seminar on "Global English," and as such I've been reading a book called The Story of English, by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran (my version came without pictures, though). The book is incredibly useful as a summary history of the formation and dissemination of the English language. It starts with English's early variants -- Old and Middle English -- and continues through the postcolonial era, with chapters on the dialects (and accents) of English found in Canada, the U.S., Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and of course the Indian subcontinent. The stuff on English in early periods is particularly helpful to me, as I've never really understood things like the 'great vowel shift' (now I do).
As I was reading the India chapter, I began to wonder: is 'Indian English' really a distinct linguistic phenomenon -- a patois or a dialect? McCrum et al. cite the following as an example of Indianized English in an old article (1986) from the Telegraph:
And this is how they interpret it:
Their main claim here -- that Indians are "indigenizing" English -- seems reasonable at first. But in the end, both the word "indigenizing" and the idea that Indian English is a "reinterpretation" of the English language seem too vague to be really supportable. It suggests an ongoing process of systemic, and growing difference from British or American English.
There are many, many examples of Hindustani words entering into everyday English in India (such as "dacoit" in the above passage; there could be dozens of examples). But that's just local vocabulary; it doesn't prove much. Secondly, there are some grammatical tics that Hindi-speakers tend to bring into their English, most of which will be all-too-familiar to readers: overuse of the present participle ("I am doing"), overuse of "only" ("like this only"), and underuse of the definite article (the missing "the").
And there are many more examples listed here and at Wikipedia. (Some are a little questionable, if you ask me.)
But all in all, the structural differences seem pretty small. More importantly, they aren't generally reproduced (and they aren't taught). When Indians become aware of grammatical tics, they tend to try and correct them. The goal is some idea of "standard" English, not "indigenized" English.
The idea that Indian English is evolving into an identifiable dialect has been popular, partly along the lines of "one should respect different cultures": there is this postcolonial awareness that standard (i.e., BBC) English need not apply to everyone. In principle I agree (no one standard should or could be applied), but I find the evidence that thoroughgoing indigenization has actually occurred to be suspect.
To be clear: I'm not saying that people in India who speak less standarized English should become more "correct." Rather, I've observed that people learning English in India eventually do away with Hindi elements. The distinguishing features of the "dialect" disappear, and the only remaining defining feature of Indian English is the vocabulary, which is fascinating, but relatively trivial.
As I was reading the India chapter, I began to wonder: is 'Indian English' really a distinct linguistic phenomenon -- a patois or a dialect? McCrum et al. cite the following as an example of Indianized English in an old article (1986) from the Telegraph:
Frequent dacoities and looting of fish from bheris in the Sonarpur area has created a serious law and order problem. Tension prevails in the entire area which has 60 bheris. Dacoits armed with pipe-guns, swords and sticks strike before the villagers can retaliate. They surround the bheris and loot the fish. For the villagers, the attacks are 'straight out of Hindi movies'.
And this is how they interpret it:
This fragment of Indian journalistm is an unspectacular but typical example of the everyday uses of English in a society that is continuously indigenizing a foreign language. It is the reinterpretation of the English language by the Indian people -- a process echoed in Ireland -- that has fascinated visitors from the very beginnings of the British involvement in India.
Their main claim here -- that Indians are "indigenizing" English -- seems reasonable at first. But in the end, both the word "indigenizing" and the idea that Indian English is a "reinterpretation" of the English language seem too vague to be really supportable. It suggests an ongoing process of systemic, and growing difference from British or American English.
There are many, many examples of Hindustani words entering into everyday English in India (such as "dacoit" in the above passage; there could be dozens of examples). But that's just local vocabulary; it doesn't prove much. Secondly, there are some grammatical tics that Hindi-speakers tend to bring into their English, most of which will be all-too-familiar to readers: overuse of the present participle ("I am doing"), overuse of "only" ("like this only"), and underuse of the definite article (the missing "the").
And there are many more examples listed here and at Wikipedia. (Some are a little questionable, if you ask me.)
But all in all, the structural differences seem pretty small. More importantly, they aren't generally reproduced (and they aren't taught). When Indians become aware of grammatical tics, they tend to try and correct them. The goal is some idea of "standard" English, not "indigenized" English.
The idea that Indian English is evolving into an identifiable dialect has been popular, partly along the lines of "one should respect different cultures": there is this postcolonial awareness that standard (i.e., BBC) English need not apply to everyone. In principle I agree (no one standard should or could be applied), but I find the evidence that thoroughgoing indigenization has actually occurred to be suspect.
To be clear: I'm not saying that people in India who speak less standarized English should become more "correct." Rather, I've observed that people learning English in India eventually do away with Hindi elements. The distinguishing features of the "dialect" disappear, and the only remaining defining feature of Indian English is the vocabulary, which is fascinating, but relatively trivial.
Back to normality; Midival Punditz interview
Ack, classes start next week at Lehigh, and there are 20 things I meant to do this summer that aren't done.
Meanwhile, I just did my last Sepia Mutiny post. Phew. Just trying to keep up the pace there totally took over my normal blogging routine.
So for any readers who were slightly miffed that basically everything I've posted here in the past month has been a cross-post, miff no more. I also have some non-South Asia related posts I want to do, though they've been on the backburner since I went 'Sepia'.
Oh, and here's a little link for you: the Midival Punditz, a Delhi-based Asian underground band, were on NPR last week. Here is the interview. Their CD, Midival Times, is readily available in World Music sections in Borders, and on Amazon as well as Itunes. I was listening to it a lot over the weekend, and definitely recommend it.
Meanwhile, I just did my last Sepia Mutiny post. Phew. Just trying to keep up the pace there totally took over my normal blogging routine.
So for any readers who were slightly miffed that basically everything I've posted here in the past month has been a cross-post, miff no more. I also have some non-South Asia related posts I want to do, though they've been on the backburner since I went 'Sepia'.
Oh, and here's a little link for you: the Midival Punditz, a Delhi-based Asian underground band, were on NPR last week. Here is the interview. Their CD, Midival Times, is readily available in World Music sections in Borders, and on Amazon as well as Itunes. I was listening to it a lot over the weekend, and definitely recommend it.
Reading Azar Nafisi as a Literary Critic
In addition to being a memoir and an intense account of life for a feminist, western-educated academic in post-revolutionary Iran, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of what might be called Aristotelian literary criticism. It has four chapters and four primary subjects: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. She has challenging close readings of each, including an especially inspired read of The Great Gatsby, about which there is more below. I'm not surprised that the publishers of Reading Lolita have played down the lit-crit content in this memoir, as it is considerably less marketable than the publishing phenom that is Oppressed Muslim Women. But ignore the cover blurb from Bernard Lewis, and try and forget that this would be an Oprah Book Club book (if Oprah still had a Book Club... damn you/bless you, Jonathan Franzen!); Nafisi has compelling ideas about the authors she loves, and works them out at length in this memoir.
As a reader, Nafisi is not just avowedly apolitical, she is militantly so. There is a theory of literature scattered through these pages, a theory that I haven't yet been able to pin down in a single phrase or passage, but it's one that is strongly oriented to the freedom of the imagination. A good starting point might be the following paraphrase of something Nafisi told her class while teaching The Great Gatsby at the University of Tehran in the early 1980s:
This metaphor, of reading as breathing is not entirely innocent, as Nafisi well knows. She herself did graduate work in the English department at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, and was a committed leftist early in her career. (Her Ph.D. dissertation, she tells us, was on the American communist Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money and My Aunt Lena.) In Nafisi's early years as a professor of literature, everything was political. And the early years of the Islamic Revolution made the politicization of literature permanent (albeit in right-wing Islamist terms). After initially resisting the regime, Nafisi settled into a life that entailed compromising with it on matters such as the veil, as well as her own idealism. As the fascistic, repressive hold of the regime deepened, Nafisi started to change her thinking. She came to realize that the line between even divergent orthodoxies is negligible, so long as they aim to quell dissent, deviance, or any kind individuated intelligence whatsoever. Reading Lolita in Tehran, written after Nafisi left the country in 1997, argues this latter point quite forcefully. For Nafisi, any rigidly orthodox mode of reading fails to account for the complexity of the mind, or of the story itself.
Of course, it isn't quite accurate to say that reading Reading Lolita in Tehran is the same as reading a book by, say, Denis Donoghue. Nafisi sets up the Gatsby reading with her own personal experiences leading up to her first attempts at teaching it at the University of Tehran in 1981. The ideologically hyper-charged climate is important, but so is the fact that Nafisi started out teaching immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when left-leaning intellectuals were still somewhat confident that their views would be accepted by the new Regime. They still dominated the universities at the time, and the rich, modernist, almost Parisian arts culture of pre-revolutionary Tehran seemed too important to simply be erased (little did they know).
The university as a whole was not yet Islamized when she first taught this book, but many of her students were. Indeed, as she tried to teach Gatsby in an Intro to the Novel type class, Nafisi found that some of her students simply could not stop objecting to the novel's "immorality," specifically its seeming "advocacy" of "adultery." She resolved the problem through rather drastic means: she allowed her students to put The Great Gatsby on trial. She let the most strident critic of the novel's immorality speak for the prosecution, and one of her female students spoke in the novel's defense. Nafisi herself 'was' the novel in the mock trial (the defendent). The students' statements both contra- and pro-Gatsby make for some of the most memorable passages in the book.
(As I was reading, I was thinking about whether or how such a teaching strategy might work in my own classroom. It seems doubtful, because my students, as much as I like and respect them, simply don't feel as passionately about virtually anything as Nafisi's students did.)
Back to Gatsby. It's important to keep in mind that Nafisi mentions that Fitzgerald was in some sense counter-programming to the leftists on her syllabus:
It was only later that her experience with Gatsby became the defining one for Nafisi. This idea of the betrayal of ideals is one that appears again and again in the Gatsby section of Nafisi's memoir, and it points at what might be the philosophical basis of her approach to literature -- the failure of Platonism.
What Nafisi sees in Gatsby is not a celebration of ideal or idealization, but its inevitable collapse. (In this sense, her reading of the novel is quite different from the one John Holbo outlined on the Valve back in April.) I think it's a point worth mulling over. It's certainly an arguable reading (doesn't Fitzgerald's novel celebrate illusions, not demystify them?). But here is Nafisi, again paraphrasing one of her lectures on the novel:
Even if one might disagree with her take on this and other novels, what's impressive is Nafisi's ability to make this quintessentially American novel a matter of quintessentially Iranian/progressive ethics. She finds, remarkably, a natural channel from Gatsby back to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The index is the danger of ideals, of which Nick Carraway is as guilty as the Islamic Revolution. When Nafisi refers to the Ayatollah Khomeini and the other leaders of the Revolution in Iran as "Philosopher- Kings," as she does several times, she knows exactly what she's doing.
This book provokes serious thinking seriously about the value of the literary. Part of its power comes directly from the text of the memoir, from Nafisi's own pointed arguments about why one reads, and why she herself reads and teaches literature. But it also comes from the strangeness of the situation: here are these women, their lives destroyed by an unthinkably repressive regime, and their most subversive act is... to get together once a week to read photocopied (illegal) copies of Lolita? (Hardly, on the surface, a feminist or progressive text in the received/ conventional readings; Nafisi reads it against the grain.) All in all, it's rather improbable and anti-intuitive that Nafisi became a less political reader, rather than a more political one. But she makes a good case for her response: no matter what they banned or who they imprisoned/tortured/executed, literature provided the means to keep one's imagination free and open. Humbert Humbert, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Elizabeth Benneet were the characters whose stories Nafisi knew and loved best, they were the characters that kept her and her students' minds alive until the they could get out.
As a reader, Nafisi is not just avowedly apolitical, she is militantly so. There is a theory of literature scattered through these pages, a theory that I haven't yet been able to pin down in a single phrase or passage, but it's one that is strongly oriented to the freedom of the imagination. A good starting point might be the following paraphrase of something Nafisi told her class while teaching The Great Gatsby at the University of Tehran in the early 1980s:
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. it is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empthaize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.
This metaphor, of reading as breathing is not entirely innocent, as Nafisi well knows. She herself did graduate work in the English department at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, and was a committed leftist early in her career. (Her Ph.D. dissertation, she tells us, was on the American communist Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money and My Aunt Lena.) In Nafisi's early years as a professor of literature, everything was political. And the early years of the Islamic Revolution made the politicization of literature permanent (albeit in right-wing Islamist terms). After initially resisting the regime, Nafisi settled into a life that entailed compromising with it on matters such as the veil, as well as her own idealism. As the fascistic, repressive hold of the regime deepened, Nafisi started to change her thinking. She came to realize that the line between even divergent orthodoxies is negligible, so long as they aim to quell dissent, deviance, or any kind individuated intelligence whatsoever. Reading Lolita in Tehran, written after Nafisi left the country in 1997, argues this latter point quite forcefully. For Nafisi, any rigidly orthodox mode of reading fails to account for the complexity of the mind, or of the story itself.
Of course, it isn't quite accurate to say that reading Reading Lolita in Tehran is the same as reading a book by, say, Denis Donoghue. Nafisi sets up the Gatsby reading with her own personal experiences leading up to her first attempts at teaching it at the University of Tehran in 1981. The ideologically hyper-charged climate is important, but so is the fact that Nafisi started out teaching immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when left-leaning intellectuals were still somewhat confident that their views would be accepted by the new Regime. They still dominated the universities at the time, and the rich, modernist, almost Parisian arts culture of pre-revolutionary Tehran seemed too important to simply be erased (little did they know).
The university as a whole was not yet Islamized when she first taught this book, but many of her students were. Indeed, as she tried to teach Gatsby in an Intro to the Novel type class, Nafisi found that some of her students simply could not stop objecting to the novel's "immorality," specifically its seeming "advocacy" of "adultery." She resolved the problem through rather drastic means: she allowed her students to put The Great Gatsby on trial. She let the most strident critic of the novel's immorality speak for the prosecution, and one of her female students spoke in the novel's defense. Nafisi herself 'was' the novel in the mock trial (the defendent). The students' statements both contra- and pro-Gatsby make for some of the most memorable passages in the book.
(As I was reading, I was thinking about whether or how such a teaching strategy might work in my own classroom. It seems doubtful, because my students, as much as I like and respect them, simply don't feel as passionately about virtually anything as Nafisi's students did.)
Back to Gatsby. It's important to keep in mind that Nafisi mentions that Fitzgerald was in some sense counter-programming to the leftists on her syllabus:
Before I started teaching The Great Gatsby, we had discussed in class some short stories by Maxim Gorky and Mike Gold. Gorky was very popular at the time--many of his stories and the novel The Mother had been translated into Persian, and he was read widely by the revolutionaries, both old and young. This made Gatsby seem oddly irrelevant, a strange choice to teach at a university where almost all the students were burning with revolutionary zeal. Now, in retrospect, I see that Gatsby was the right choice. Only later did I come to realize how the values shaping that novel were the exact opposite of those of the revolution. Ironically, as time went by, it was the values inherent in Gatsby that would triumph, but at the time we had not yet realized just how far we had betrayed our dreams.
It was only later that her experience with Gatsby became the defining one for Nafisi. This idea of the betrayal of ideals is one that appears again and again in the Gatsby section of Nafisi's memoir, and it points at what might be the philosophical basis of her approach to literature -- the failure of Platonism.
What Nafisi sees in Gatsby is not a celebration of ideal or idealization, but its inevitable collapse. (In this sense, her reading of the novel is quite different from the one John Holbo outlined on the Valve back in April.) I think it's a point worth mulling over. It's certainly an arguable reading (doesn't Fitzgerald's novel celebrate illusions, not demystify them?). But here is Nafisi, again paraphrasing one of her lectures on the novel:
I would like to begin with a quote from Fitzgerald that is central to our understanding, not just of Gatsby but of Fitzgerald's whole body of work, I began. We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we've mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion. Nick disapproves of all the people with whom Gatsby is in one way or another involved, but he does not pass the same judgment on Gatsby. Why? Because Gatsby possesses what Fitzgerald, in his story 'Absolution,' calls the 'honesty of imagination.'
Even if one might disagree with her take on this and other novels, what's impressive is Nafisi's ability to make this quintessentially American novel a matter of quintessentially Iranian/progressive ethics. She finds, remarkably, a natural channel from Gatsby back to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The index is the danger of ideals, of which Nick Carraway is as guilty as the Islamic Revolution. When Nafisi refers to the Ayatollah Khomeini and the other leaders of the Revolution in Iran as "Philosopher- Kings," as she does several times, she knows exactly what she's doing.
This book provokes serious thinking seriously about the value of the literary. Part of its power comes directly from the text of the memoir, from Nafisi's own pointed arguments about why one reads, and why she herself reads and teaches literature. But it also comes from the strangeness of the situation: here are these women, their lives destroyed by an unthinkably repressive regime, and their most subversive act is... to get together once a week to read photocopied (illegal) copies of Lolita? (Hardly, on the surface, a feminist or progressive text in the received/ conventional readings; Nafisi reads it against the grain.) All in all, it's rather improbable and anti-intuitive that Nafisi became a less political reader, rather than a more political one. But she makes a good case for her response: no matter what they banned or who they imprisoned/tortured/executed, literature provided the means to keep one's imagination free and open. Humbert Humbert, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Elizabeth Benneet were the characters whose stories Nafisi knew and loved best, they were the characters that kept her and her students' minds alive until the they could get out.
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