Joshua Krueger #3042188
CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the
Other
Richard McCutcheon; September 26, 2011
Think
Piece #2: Who will define Civilization?
How does one
respond to the writers of colonial reality; to the ones who have been fed
oppression and mercilessly respond with the truth? As a reader, watching the
moral authority of my own civilization buckle as if it was the backs of those
it has oppressed, I am filled with wonder and despair. Frantz Fanon calls for a
complete reconstruction of the political and economic imagination and my feeble
attempts to retain some handle on my reality through reasonable and balanced
conduct is already countered by the words: “For the native, objectivity is
always directed against him.”[1]
My desire towards action is halted by my creeping thoughts that force me to
compare my own independent beliefs against the indoctrination of the native bourgeoisie
towards the system of western values. To Fanon, we are both complicit in
defending the status quo by unconsciously pushing the conflict towards our own
needs and sources of power, rather than for what is right. While I would
prefer, because of my own personal taste and educational training, that
conflicts should be lessened and even resolved, my guilt and horror paralyzes
my mind to critically engage and all I can do is avert my eyes and agree with
Fanon’s psychology of the native. In this place of deception, all that matters
is bread and land; the native knows this and knows that the only way to get
such concrete realities is through concrete actions. Therefore, there will be
violence.
While I distress over the ease
with which I can stray from my upbringing as a Mennonite pacifist, I cannot
argue with the truth-tipped quotes presented by Aimé Césaire. Is there any more
scathing attack to the western liberal than to be unhumorously compared to Hitler?
To be shown in my own thoughts and education how racist even my indignation is.
I confess that until this moment I did not understand that I too despised the
“humiliation of the white man” more so than the “humiliation of man” as such.[2]
Césaire pulls the curtain fully away to show that the great figures of the west
are nothing more than barbarians and hypocrites, especially in comparison to
the real black race who are “civilized to the marrow of their bones!”[3]
How then did I come to believe these
things? Did I choose to start believing in the invention of the “barbaric negro,”[4]
or is my deterioration a necessary result of the manufactured “keel of evil and
of mystery stabilizing the ship and course that is Western history?”[5]
As Michael Taussig’s article explains, the production of rubber in the Amazon required
the use of torture and terror – possible through colonization – to create the
context of abstract labour necessary for capitalism.[6]
For such a process to be sustainable in the human psyche, the Other needs to be
constructed in a way that justifies and sanctifies the abuser. Maybe my entire
being is only an extension of this unholy trinity between capitalism, racism
and power.
I find myself asking the
question that has been asked before me: “What sort of understanding – what sort
of speech, writing, and construction of meaning by any mode – can deal with and
subvert that?”[7] With
the storm of guilt hovering above me, how do I begin the process of cutting out
the precepts of my identity – nevertheless the identity of a culture – that
make it impossible to encounter the Other in any meaningful way? Or is it my
responsibility, with fear and trembling, to step aside and humbly accept the
role that my culture has forced upon the rest of the world and let the Other
create the definition of civilization.
[2] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on
Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 3 http://www.rlwclarke.net/Theory/SourcesPrimary/CesaireDiscourseonColonialism.pdf
(Accessed September 22, 2011).
[5] Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror--Space of Death: Roger
Casement's Putumayo Report and the
Explanation of Torture,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 26, No. 3. (1984): 470 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-4175%28198407%2926%3A3%3C467%3ACOTODR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4 (Accessed September 22, 2011).
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