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This text explores the concept of Orientalism as a system of representations created by Western political forces that shaped Western learning, consciousness, and empire. It delves into the stereotypes and biases associated with the Orient, depicting it as inferior, exotic, and a threat to Western values. The text also discusses latent and manifest Orientalism and its impact on policy decisions. Additionally, it examines the experiences of migrants and their transformation in a new cultural and linguistic environment.
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Edward Said- Orientalism The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West. Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship. The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.
Said Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior. Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.
Salman Rushdie From an early version of Midnight’s Children: Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence, but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail.
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that it’s loss is part of our common humanity. Which seem to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. Is is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere.’ ... human beings do not percieve things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. ... Meaning is a shaky edifice we built out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.
Imaginary Homelands To migrate is certainly to lose language and home, to be defined by others, to become invisible, or even worse, a target; it is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul. But the migrant is not simply transformed by his act; he also transforms his new world. Migrants may well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridization that newness can emerge.
Rushdie The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago. Perhaps “Commonwealth Literature” was invented to delay the day when we rough beasts actually slouch into Bethlehem. In which case, it’s time to admit that the center cannot hold.
W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1920) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Rushdie A full migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what is to be a human being. Denying all three, the migrant is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human.
Rushdie The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hodgepodge, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again . . ." Just before dawn one winter's morning, New Year's Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.
Satanic Verses "I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you," and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, "To the devil with your tunes," the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, "in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now."
Satanic Verses Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. "Ohé, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch." At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. "Hey, Spoono," Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, "Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat."
Amos Tutuola, Simbi and the Satyr of the Dark Jungle (1955) Dogo took Simbi to a big shop immediately they entered the town. It was an auctioneer’s shop and there was a very wide, flat ground at the front of this shop. It was on that ground the auctioneer used to sell all articles or slaves which or who were to be sold very urgently. After Dogo had explained to the auctioneer that he wanted him to sell Simbi by urgent, for he wanted the quick money for buying food, then the auctioneer first put Simbi on the weighing scale just to know her exact weight which would enable him to know the real price that he would impose upon her.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone. ... He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
Derek Walcott, “Love after Love” The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self.Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
