Turning and turning the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
--W.B. Yeats “The Second Coming”
The absent center, the transcendental signified. Author Chinua Achebe employs W.B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" to portray the disjunctive relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The protagonist, Okonkwo, is
lost in his ability to recognize the culture and community he comes from after
his banishment from Umuofia (Okonkwo’s village and home). The Ibo culture he
knew and loved had altered drastically with the infiltration of the English
colonizers. The center of Okonkwo’s life – his theological and mental
organization – had been destroyed with Western ideals, namely Christianity.
Jacques Derrida sheds light on this story. The Europeans, (in this case, particularly
the district commissioner employed in the closing stages of the novel), seek to
observe and understand the Ibo culture. Why? And why doesn’t this work? This
does not work because of ethnocentrism. “Mr. Brown” and the district
commissioner (Achebe employs these characters as primary facets to observe the
distorted relationship between the colonizers and the colonized) enter
Okonkwo’s village for two reasons (other than physical profit and land power):
to observe this “primitive species” and to enlighten “them” on civilization and
culture. Upon entering the village, the fragile ecosystem (present in ANY
culture) is shattered.
In walks Jacques Derrida.
Derrida recognizes this destructive pattern present in
countless stories, tales and historical recollections. What is it? It is
ethnocentrism. Humans seek to find the answer to infiltrating without
destroying, but in the process, we annihilate and devastate that particular way of
existence.
Other cultures are not Other as we so often see them to be.
Rather, they are other. Ethnocentrism is destructive because it seeks to
“study” another culture as "Other" with the attitude that the observer’s culture is
dominant to the subject’s culture. Instead, Derrida argues, we need to study
the relationship
between
the cultures, how different culture impact one another in yet another, larger
ecosystem.
But alas, we have not yet found a way.
So we are stuck, in a turning and widening gyre, loosing
touch with our roots, falling into an absent center – releasing deeper and more
violent anarchy than ever before.
What are we going to do? How are we going to fix this?
The answer is simple, according to some. We will wait. For a
Superman.
In 2010, Walden Media in part with Get Schooled, Participant
Media, and TakePart.com released a powerful documentary called “Waiting for
Superman” http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/
. This documentary traces the process of several young students across the
United States as they seek acceptance to schools that will not turn them out
and treat them like a cog in a machine in a factory (Bricoleur?). This film illustrates the
desperate need for the United States to reform its public education system. How
is this relevant? I feel this film is relevant on multiple levels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg
First, it implies our cultures’ desperation, that we are
simply here, waiting for a being with superpowers to enter into our plight and
save us from our struggles. We displace our disability onto a superability
(Freud and Berube). Jacques Lacan has a similar point.
Jacques Lacan and Rene Descartes (a sixteenth to seventeenth
century French philosopher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Descartes
) explore the idea of “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not
think. (based off of cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am). This phrase
explores the relationship of the ego and the shadow, part of how we recognize
what we are is by recognizing what we are not. However, this recognition can
only go so far when we define our capabilities by superhuman strength. We are
not superwomen or men, we must apply our strengths and abilities to become the
person we are waiting for.
Oftentimes, I think that when things get tough the first thing that people want to do is either feel bad for themselves or quit. They want someone else to come in and solve whatever situation they might be in (ie, they wait for superman).
ReplyDeleteIn the J. Cole song "Last Call" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddY1an4yhJQ), there is a monologue at the end of the song where J. Cole talks about his struggles to get signed at a record label. He says that he knew he was good enough, but that a lot of labels didn't think he was. He compares it to the proverbial "Making the team" scenario, where a high school kid goes to see the list of people who made the team, and doesn't see his name. He looks around and he knows that he's better than most of the other guys, but the coach didn't see. J. Cole believes that there are two types of people in that situation: those who quit and those who use it as fuel to go harder. He finishes by saying that now in life, when he "goes to tryouts" he makes sure that there is "no way the fuckin' coach is passin" on him.
Perhaps not the exact scenario that Derrida or Lacan saw when they published their work.
I really enjoyed reading this post and I was really excited with the fact that you mentioned Chinua Achebe, especially considering he seems to be relevant to nearly all of my classes this semester.
ReplyDeleteI also like your idea of waiting for "superman" as well, and I agree with your conclusion. When I watched the video, I couldn't help but think that someone's "superman" is almost always represented by a "white hero". I think we can also look to Lacan and Derrida to give us an idea of another way to look at "heroes" - maybe a different type of superman. And that's where you brought us to: becoming the person we are waiting for.