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My Take “On National Culture”- Samaha Blogpost One

by Hossain 1 Comment

“On National Culture” 

“The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that

you do not

Shaheed Minar in Bangladesh erected in honor of the Language Movement

show proof of your nation from its culture, 

but that you substantiate its existence

in the fight, which the people wage,

against the forces, of occupation.

No colonial system draws its justification from the fact that the territories are

culturally non-existent.

You will never make colonialism blush

for shame, by spreading out little-known cultural treasures, under its eyes.

 

what he [the native intellectual] ultimately intends to embrace are

in fact, the castoffs of thought,

Women resisting during the Bengali Liberation War in 1971

its shells, 

and corpses, a knowledge

which has been stabilized once and for

all.

 

he must go

on until he has found the seething pot–

of which the learning of,

the future will emerge” 

(Fanon, 223 and 225).

For this week’s blog post, I chose Frantz Fanon’s piece, “On National Culture.” It stood out to me because it seemed to have a lot in tandem with what Shange was writing about in “my pen is a machete.” Throughout her piece, she was writing to dismantle the oppressive imposition of the English language unto Black people and those oppressed within the United States, which was evident in the way she chose to spell her words and use breaks that felt familiar to her. Fanon had similar feelings as he continually expressed his discontent with colonial efforts to erase national identities. He suggests that the cultural identity of a nation emerges after its liberation. From my understanding, he poses liberation as distancing one’s  identity from European hegemonic entanglement. He also suggests that searching for an identity solely connected with one’s ancestry and past, may leave one feeling unfulfilled in the present. Thus, he suggests that breaking free from these binary thoughts may foster a new national and cultural identity.

The excerpt I chose to rearrange into a poem delineates these three phases that he speaks in a beautiful way, while depicting the struggle and the extent needed to combat the oppression of not just the English language and art, but European impositions upon colonized people. I inserted a picture of Bangladeshi women carrying guns and protesting during the Bengali Liberation War in 1971. This example resonates with me and this post because it exemplifies radical protest and revolution against the colonial Pakistani rule during that time. I think that it also connects back to Shange’s readings for this week because the liberation war grew out of the Bengali language movement, during which, Bengalis fought for their mother tongue, under Pakistani rule. Thus, all of these moments in history coincide in the way that they struggle and radicalize around an identity and against an oppressive, often, colonial force. This is meaningful to me because as someone non-white born in America and having never visited my mother country, I sometimes debate the politics of  my belonging in the U.S. I think Shange’s rearrangement and ownership of the English language to serve her work is radical and inspiring, and it is a direction towards continuing decolonial projects. Her pen is her machete, and I await to find my own.

The Colonized Intellectual

by Aissata Ba 1 Comment

“National culture is the collective thought

process of a people to describe,

justify,

and extol the actions

whereby they have joined forces

and remained strong…

National culture in the under­developed countries,

therefore,

must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle

these countries are waging.” (National Culture, Fanon)

This quote was quite interesting to me because it could easily be applied to modern day music and Shange. Awhile back, I had a small discussion with my friends about Nigerian music being called African music or Jamaican music being simply referred to as Caribbean music. Interestingly, the conversation shifted into talking about race, music, locality, etc. This quote also brought up two questions for me: what power does the collective have that an individual would not? To what extent or in what situations is the collective force necessary or needed? Shange And Fanon have two completely different writing styles. Though Shange’s writing might be a bit of an easier read, both writers and thinkers are intellectual and revolutionary thinkers.

Going back to the entire reading by Fanon, Fanon details three stages in what he called the “colonized intellectual”. Fanon explained that in the first stage, the intellectual mimics the colonist and conforms to colonial tastes. This is a stage where the colonized tries to be like the Europeans, extolling and admiring European culture. In the second stage, Fanon explains,  the colonized reacts against this assimilation and desire. This is the Négritude phase in which, in reaction to the European casting of African culture as inferior, the intellectual extols each and every thing about African culture as superior. In the third stage, this love for culture finally moves to a fight for liberation. The intellectual begins to write “combat literature, revolutionary literature” that hopes to galvanize and motivate the people into fighting the colonists. In this stage, Fanon explains is the hope that developing a new culture will begin to shape a new nation.

Feminism and Fanon

by Dayna Beatty 1 Comment

I really enjoyed reading Fanon’s chapter “Algeria Unveiled” from his book A Dying Colonialism. Having read his article knowing that I was going to transform his words into a poem “Shange style,” gave me a new appreciation for his words. Personally, I find reading pieces by theorists like Marx and Foucault quite difficult because the writing is not as approachable as some other more contemporary authors. I expected Fanon’s work to be much of the same but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed this piece in particular—specifically, the style of it. Fanon discusses the Western notion that women who wear the veil are in need of saving and how this idea has become militarized to justify white intervention in the Middle East. In previous courses I have read Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving,” and this piece echoed the sentiment of contemporary Middle Eastern scholars, which was refreshing to read from a male scholar writing in 1965. He describes how the veil is understood in the West as a mechanism of oppression, and by intervening in the Algeria and “saving” these women, they were “symbolically unveiled.” (Fanon 42) However, from the perspective of the colonized this symbolic unveiling can also be understood as rape—of both body and culture. What the colonizer understands as “freedom,” (as motivated by military goals,) the colonized sees this same action as an expression of violence against a physical and mental space. Fanon writes, in regards to the “saving” of Algerian women by the colonizers, “every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.” (Fanon 43) Essentially, that the unveiling of women was the acceptance of colonization and one’s position as subordinate to the colonizer. Fanon then explores the effect of this, which was the choice to employ women in the fight against the colonizer. Fanon writes that “this decision to involve women in active elements of the Algerian Revolution was not reached lightly” and that at the start, female involvement in the war was restricted to “married women whose husbands were militants,” then gradually expanded to include “widows or divorced women.” (Fanon 51) Eventually, the volunteering of unmarried girls grew so high that “the political leaders…. Removed all restrictions to accept indiscriminately the support of all Algerian women.” (Fanon 51) While unveiling of women was a violent action in the name of Western perceptions of freedom, this permission to fight against the colonizer was the type of freedom that Algerian woman wanted. Fanon illuminates the key difference between Western perceptions of freedom and what women in Algeria truly want.

 

Women then became an instrumental part of the war and proved to be key militants in the fight against colonization. Fanon spends the later portion of his piece describing how it is that these Western stereotype of “innocence” among women who wear the veil was then militarized by Algerian women in their fight for independence. By mobilizing notions of femininity and its stereotypical ties to weakness and the veil, Algerian women became key players in the resistance, unassuming soldiers that were able to infiltrate European’s by using their own misinformed notions against them.

 

The idea of “saving women” at the surface level can be understood as feminist as freeing an entire country of women from the oppressive man, but in actuality, the story is quite different, and this is what Fanon attempts to make clear. The veil is a garment worn by women throughout history. It is just as anti-feminist to force a woman to wear a veil as it is to force her not to wear the veil. By forcing women to remove the veil, woman by woman, “piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare.” (Fanon 32) This physical removal of a garments, against the will of the wearer, is extremely possessive, dangerous, and anti-feminist. Fanon does the work of demonstrating how this is the case, and in my opinion his work can be understood as an attempt at an early, male’s feminist critique of colonialism.

 

Having read Shange’s works and understanding her emphasis on movement in literature, I began to see that in Fanon’s work as well. His piece is written in a very approachable and lyrical way, yet his words reflect the mood of the piece. His words of conquer are violent and the language he picks to illuminate this are visible throughout this piece. He uses words like “flesh,” “eroticism,” “brutality,” and “sadism” throughout his piece to evoke a feeling of forced entry—encroachment on physical space and culture. I tried to use the same type of forceful language throughout my poem to produce the same kind of effect. This exercise demonstrated to me how important a “mood” of a piece is—how choosing very specific words have a certain effect that is a deliberate choice made by the author to make the readers feel a certain way.

Philosophical Underpinnings–from movement to breath?

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Ntozake and Savannah Shange (PBS screenshot)

i can’t count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in/ the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world  & the “self”  (LLS 19).

in everything I have ever written & everything I hope to write/ i have made use of what Frantz Fanon called “combat breath” (LLS 19).

 In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born 

. . . a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create a livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist

—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (247)

I wanted to tell you a bit about why we are reading Fanon and Rich today. (The readings are now linked to the appropriate week on the syllabus–and we will have presentations from Elizabeth and Anna Bella!)  Shange reads so widely that we could spend an entire semester reading her identified influences from Ngugi wa T’iongo and Edouard Glissant to  Judy Grahn and Jessica Hagedorn.  Fanon’s influence as you will see below, is pretty obvious in Shange’s thoughts about breath and

Reading Zake: The Sacred Never Runs Out

by Amanda 8 Comments

–MUSIC– This is a really long youtube video of David Murray/Black Saint Quartet performing live in Berlin, but the energy shared between the musicians makes it well worth watching.

“There’s no music I hear without sensing you.”

This line is written in a letter Zake addresses to and in memory of her father–later to be used/edited for inclusion in Gloria Wade-Gayles anthology Father Songs. The quote made a circle in my mind that brought me to my first post rewriting Fanon, in which I talked about how laying claim to history and looking to the past as a way of informing one’s future is an important healing practice. This quote brings forth that feeling as truth. It brings forward the feeling that music is an art form capable of being inhabited (by soul/reality/existence/being/life) for healing. & to listen to music//really//listen to the music/ is to open oneself up to the voices & presence of the sacred.

overwhelmingly beautiful you

by Michelle 0 Comments

Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”–Post by Michelle Loo

“A strand of hair, a bit of forehead, a segment of an ‘overwhelmingly beautiful’ face glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train, may suffice to keep alive and strengthen the European’s persistence in his irrational conviction that the Algerian woman is the queen of all women” (43).

A strand of hair

a [bit] of forehead

a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face

overwhelmingly beautiful

glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,

yeh you

may suffice to keep alive / strengthen / reinforce the European’s persistence / irrational conviction that the Algerian woman

the overwhelmingly beautiful you

is

the

queen of all women.

 

Breaking the quote into several lines emphasize the pace and flow of the train of thoughts. It begins with short observations, “A strand of hair,” “a [bit] of forehead,” a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face,” but then the pattern changes to no longer listing an observation but describing what about the observation, “glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,” alerting the reader that the poem is ready to go somewhere. “yeh you” is the final scream at the reader to pay attention because the following lines are going to be quick and insightful. The next line explains the significance and violence behind the observations listed in the beginning of the poem. It does so in the longest line of the poem with slashes instead of line breaks to separate fragments in order to convey the overwhelmingness of this unraveling of thoughts. I added extra adjectives to this line because the explanation in this line is so important and I wanted the message to be clear, that the colonizer is persistent and aggressive. This is especially important since the tone in the following lines is no longer direct and straightforward.

I feel that including “the overwhelmingly beautiful you” at the end of the poem turns the poem’s observation [European’s persistence to save the Algerian women] into an action. It demonstrates the tactics they use to approach Algerian women, which is direct and flattering. The colonist is saying “the overwhelmingly beautiful you / is / the / queen of all women,” who wouldn’t want to join a movement that declares this conviction? It seems that Shange uses the rhetorical “you” in her pieces to do just this. It is a powerful tool to “show and not just tell” her point. By including “yeh you” towards the middle of the poem catches the reader off guard, insinuating that, “while you might not realize it right away, but I am talking about you, this is about you”, referring to the descriptors the poem begins with and what the poem is about.

Man & Woman: Running Parallel to Each Other

by Yemi 1 Comment
Man & Woman: Running Parallel to Each Other
Language of African Theatre Rewrite - Oluwayemisi Olorunwunmi

 

Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind — The Language of African Theatre

“Drama is closer to the dialectics of life than poetry and the fiction. Life is movement arising from the inherent contradiction and unity of opposites. Man and woman meet in a united dance of opposites out of which comes a human life separate from the two that gave it birth but incorporating features of both in such a way that it is recognizable at a glance that so and so is really product of so and so. The growth of that life depends on some cells dying and others being born (54).”

 

 Rewrite of Quote:

drama is clo/ser to the dialectics

of life than poetry/nd/ d fiction/

life is movement risin from d inherent contradiction nd unity of opposites/

man and woman

meet in a united dance of opposites/ out of which comes

 

a human life separate/

from d two that gave it birth/ but incorporating features of both/

in such a way that it is/ recognizable/

at a glance/

 

that so and so is really product of so and so

d growth of that life depends on som cells dying/ nd others being born

 

 

Rewriting the excerpt for Ngugi’s The Language in African Theatre was liberating. Breaking away from the structure of prose into a text that is more fluid deepened my understanding of the text. I created spaces of silence, so that as I read the text I could reflect on the words for a longer period of time. Using paragraph breaks at “/out of which comes” into “a human life” emphasized the literal meaning of the text. I could show how life would emerge on paper and through this the natural emergence of humans. Using slashes broke apart ideas that would normally be hard to digest. They also gave additionally pauses.

A change that I appreciate most is the shortening or contracting of words. I change the to “d.” I changed and to “nd” while also cutting off some letters to sharpen the intake and pronunciation of the words to give the reading beats that are easy to land on. It feels pleasant to drop those letters. It’s like getting rid of dead weight, like jumping into freedom and an alternative way of being. I also changed the visually display of the words to a form that could help me see how the author’s ideas spilled into and out of each other.

Moreover, Ngugi’s “The Language of African Theatre,” echoes many of Fanon’s gender sentiments in the chapter “Algeria Unveiled” of his A Dying Colonialism. Fanon says “This is why we must watch the parallel progress of this man and this woman, of this couple that brings death to the enemy, life to the revolution (57).”

His words provide a distinct way of organizing the ideas in the Ngugi quote . Man and woman running parallel to each other is similar to the way their dance is a dance of opposites. And the theme of life that emerges from two opposite individuals is consistent. Fanon highlights the differences between man and woman by touching on their societal roles, but the movement between the two – the curving, diving, shifting, spinning – shows the dynamic conversation that happens between to humans before birth.

overwhelmingly beautiful you

by Kim Hall 3 Comments

Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”–Post by Michelle Loo

“A strand of hair, a bit of forehead, a segment of an ‘overwhelmingly beautiful’ face glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train, may suffice to keep alive and strengthen the European’s persistence in his irrational conviction that the Algerian woman is the queen of all women” (43).

A strand of hair

a [bit] of forehead

a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face

overwhelmingly beautiful

glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,

yeh you

may suffice to keep alive / strengthen / reinforce the European’s persistence / irrational conviction that the Algerian woman

the overwhelmingly beautiful you

is

the

queen of all women.

 

Breaking the quote into several lines emphasize the pace and flow of the train of thoughts. It begins with short observations, “A strand of hair,” “a [bit] of forehead,” a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face,” but then the pattern changes to no longer listing an observation but describing what about the observation, “glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,” alerting the reader that the poem is ready to go somewhere. “yeh you” is the final scream at the reader to pay attention because the following lines are going to be quick and insightful. The next line explains the significance and violence behind the observations listed in the beginning of the poem. It does so in the longest line of the poem with slashes instead of line breaks to separate fragments in order to convey the overwhelmingness of this unraveling of thoughts. I added extra adjectives to this line because the explanation in this line is so important and I wanted the message to be clear, that the colonizer is persistent and aggressive. This is especially important since the tone in the following lines is no longer direct and straightforward.

I feel that including “the overwhelmingly beautiful you” at the end of the poem turns the poem’s observation [European’s persistence to save the Algerian women] into an action. It demonstrates the tactics they use to approach Algerian women, which is direct and flattering. The Algerian is saying “the overwhelmingly beautiful you / is / the / queen of all women,” who wouldn’t want to join a movement that declares this conviction? It seems that Shange uses the rhetorical “you” in her pieces to do just this. It is a powerful tool to “show and not just tell” her point. By including “yeh you” towards the middle of the poem catches the reader off guard, insinuating that, “while you might not realize it right away, but I am talking about you, this is about you”, referring to the descriptors the poem begins with and what the poem is about.

Philosophical Underpinnings

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

i can’t count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in/ the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world  & the “self”  (LLS 19).

in everything I have ever written & everything I hope to write/ i have made use of what Frantz Fanon called “combat breath” (LLS 19).

Ladies, we have a blog!!!!! If you have problems publishing your post, you can submit it as a document in this Dropbox folder.

I wanted to tell you a bit about why we are reading Ngugi and Fanon today. As you can tell from “my pen is a machete,”  Shange’s use of the term “combat breath,” very explicitly refers to the appendix of the chapter “Algeria Unveiled” in Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism,* which has become central –and hotly–debated in discussions of colonial rule, traditionalism in colonized societies and the role of women in revolution. Obviously I’d like us to spend some time specifically talking about that concept, but also to talk about the essay as a whole.

Shange told me that reading Ngugi wa Thiong’o was very important to understanding her work. Although personally I am more familiar with The Barrel of a Pen (1967) [which perhaps Shange flags in her title, “my pen is a machete”?] and A Grain of Wheat (1983), I chose Decolonising the Mind because it’s the culmination of Ngugi’s thinking on imperialism, language, anti-colonial struggle, the role of art and culture in political struggle as well as on the future of Africa. Ngugi himself says, “This book, Decolonising the Mind  is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way” (xiv). At the end of his introduction and throughout the book, Ngugi references Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, particularly the chapter “On National Culture,”  thus, I included the latter so that you could have some sense of a Pan-African conversation about Negritude and-imperialism.

“Over the years I have come to realise more and more that work, any work, even literary creative work, is not the result of any individual genius, but the result of a collective effort.” (Decolonising x)

“This book is part of a continuing debate all over the continent about the destiny of Africa” (Decolonising 1)

But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.” (Decolonizing 3)

 

Plan for class:

  • Announcements (5 mins)
  • Discussion of blog/twitter 10 minutes)
  • Nadia Presentation & discussion
  • Break
  • Sophia Presentation