Re-Capturing the Clear

The sense of ‘normal’ never positioned itself so limitedly as today. This is a continual retort throughout history; Helene Cixous, the Algerian French philosopher, pursues the ‘incomprehensible’. The more the globalized manifestation of a false ‘universal’ forced by extremist, conservatives, and the corporate branding of identity, the farther their clarity spans away from an ‘innermost sense of self’.

Along the lines of Edouard Glissant’s need for ‘Opacity’ and Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘Tolerance of Ambiguity’; the continual historic push to have to name all, brand all, and define all, seems a fundamental swallowing up of the unclear. Fear of anything that is misunderstood because religion, government, or big business doesn’t have a dime on it leads activists and progressive thinkers to push back.

The Sociologist Maria Mies best states that there is a current need to “re-create an innermost subjective human essence” that is expressed and preserved. In her manifesto Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, she promotes the idea that “Nature is always linked to its social dimension. Human nature cannot be understood if we separate its physiology from its history; … Women/men’s interaction with nature and each other” are historically bound not merely limited to a set mystified nature (Mies).  A false sovereign authority is obsessed with clarity, lines of separation, hierarchy, and exploitation: an unhealthy claim all end all.  

The radiation of Capitalism and Colonialism over the past two centuries has worn down the sense of ‘self’ outside of the parameters of false sovereign authorities. But this is not new. Neither Jesus nor Marx differentiated between male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, race, tribe, or background; and the interpretations that others claim to uphold to such revolutionaries have been put to improper use. What constitutes as ‘Maleness’ and ‘Femaleness’ are “not biological givens but rather results of a historical process” (Mies); History has drowned the essence of self as reality has shown that forces of might mass-against individuals.

 

Finding the words to reflect this, leads to intentional confusion. For some, there is a Holocaust Memorial in our souls. Nazism is no longer pinned down to a specific location. But it is ‘an idea of elimination’: a false sense of destroying life that does not agree with the aggressive suppressive shareholders. Fascism is not unique to a single gene pool. One must also remember that the Nazi genocide was not just a destruction of 6,000,000 Jews, but also included 20,000,000 Russians, hundreds of thousands of Muslims, Homosexuals, and Gypsies (Roma people), among others.  Fascism has existed in societies from the United States to Kenya to Japan. Any denial of this or justification for mass murder and injustice would be irresponsible.

Overcoming this historic acceptance of man’s nature requires an existentialism of the highest morality. The postcolonial intellectual from Ghana, Ato Sekyi-Otu, has found a positive approach to utilize Frantz Fanon in his Dialectics of Experience.  Ato Sekyi-Otu brings to the forefront Fanon’s statement, “To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in the whole social structure being changed from the bottom-up.” The theoretical revolt involves re-capturing forbidden spaces, oppressive bondage that has inhabited radically separate and unequal zones (Sekyi-Otu). This form of existentialism parallels Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. “Unleashing the human being” and releasing possibilities of human existence, which history has imprisoned in a Sartre-like fashion or nearly a Kerouac journey, can span away from false absolutes.

During the week of May 7, 2012 the United Nations Headquarters in New York hosted the Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues. Attending were voices from countless indigenous groups. The UN recognizes nearly 370 million indigenous groups in over 90 countries. Meeting with individuals from Sami in Norway, Lakota in the US, Australian Aborigines and Amis of Taiwan, one could see how much emotional stress still actively oppresses ignored minority groups. One woman from the Yupik community in northern Alaska, Vi Waghiyi, spoke of the continual irresponsibility of the US military and Environment Protection Agency (EPA) in allowing an abandoned Cold War military base to remain an environmental threat to the local communities, as the toxic waste pollutes the native lands on the St. Lawrence Island. Such negligence is global, and leads to continued tragedy.

In the past month, I’ve read three novels, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, Helene Cixous’ Promethea, and Assia Djebar’s Fantasia. One Nigerian and two Algerians, where one has spent her life mostly in Paris and the other mostly in Algeria. The romanticism of the self in a brutal world is reflective in the novels. The understanding here is that Superiority has indeed a weakness, especially the weakness of irresponsibility.

Helene Cixous’ novel runs along the contours of her philosophy about the ‘incomprehensible’. Her narration batters upon a duel between her self and her subjective self. She cannot embrace pure action without thought, nor can she stop at this time from Descartes-like self-reflection: “For the time being I cannot do without H (Helene). I do not yet have the mental courage to be only I. I dread nothing as much as autobiography. Autobiography does not exist. Yet so many people believe it exists. … When I say ‘I’, this I is never the subject of autobiography, my I is free. Is the subject of my madness, my alarms, and my vertigo” (Cixous).  The sense of a free self is just out of reach, a mindset that beholds an animal like a squirrel caught in the moment, because her sense of I is caught in the misleading enlightenment that has limited her action. She brings this sense of opportunity for the self to transcend historic and societal limits when the narrator exposes that the idea of woman-ness is just yet again another fabrication on her identity; “I would like so much to be a woman without giving it a thought. I would like so much to be free the freest of free women: so free that I would even be liberated from the painful sensation of being-liberated. … I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to myself: ‘How free am I!’ because it is just something that I would be” (Cixous). Being-in-itself in a way so surreal or abstract that parallels Nietzsche’s dilemma, Sartre’s ad nauseam, or Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.

Cixous’ ‘incomprehensibility’ and grasping of a self away from the social mechanism placed on individuals in a highly Western society is her solution to nihilism. Solving nothing, but the pondering inner battle of who am “I” outside of gender, race, ethnicity, and one-dimensional consumer desiring-machine.  Unlike Helene Cixous’ primarily self-internal reflection, the realism of Ken Saro-Wiwa and Assia Djebar’s novels thrust characters into the violence of history. Each individual character and author had been exposed to the harsh realities of Colonialism and civil war. The entire act of war and annihilation of life proved to be outside forces overtaking life to a useless end.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian novelist and activist. He was quite outspoken in his voice against injustice and corruption.  A member of the Ogoni ethnic minority, living at a time of British colonial end, the Nigerian Civil War, and neocolonial corporate exploitation of oil resources. Since he challenged the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation publicly regarding the company’s reckless irresponsibility to the environment and the local community, the lack of clarity of his death points to the company’s stress on the government to solve the problem. The Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.

In his vivid novel, Sozaboy, Ken Saro-Wiwa reflects on the Nigerian Civil War. Like soldiers from Nigeria used for British exploits to fight in World War II, the stigma of imperialism had tarnished the diverse tribal culture of the West African region. The British used Indians in South Africa, Kenyans in Europe, and among other tactics, the character in the novel was convinced to seek a life as a soldier because the image of previous Nigerian soldiers used to ‘seek out Hitler in Burma,’ romanticized the image a soldier brought to his community. The sense of Self that the character was preparing for was based on lies, and hence his awakening to the irrationality of war taught him the lesson only too late. The character speaking in broken English, as the author’s specific intention used ‘rotten’ English to express the literature, notices the horrors of not just Civil War and British atrocities, but how the refugee camp is no life for anyone: “Because, true true as Zaza have talked, this camp is proper human compost pit and all these people they are calling refugees are actually people that they have throw away like rubbish” (Ken Saro-Wiwa).  

The harsh realities of the refugee camp in Africa are deeper than any philosophical theory. A sense of self cannot be imagined. The postcolonial reflection has not yet incorporated the ideas of refugees who remain in the camp indefinitely without opportunity. However, the incorporation of the sense of ‘self,’ struggling through apartheid and colonialism has been written down. Steve Biko noting Frantz Fanon stated: “the consciousness of the self is not the closing of a door to communication … we shall watch as time destroys his paper castles and know that all these little pranks were frantic attempts of frightened little people to convince each other that they can control the minds and bodies…” of others (Biko).

Assia Djebar’s novel Fantasia brings together the parallel controls of the French atrocities in Algeria alongside the oppression of Islamist men bullying Muslim women.  Her awareness of the self is trapped among quasi-freedoms, so her narrator must fight alongside both fronts. She notices the actions of the French against the Berber tribe not paying taxes or the corpses of the Ouled Riah tribe “laid out in the fresh air side by side, without distinction of sex or rank … denuded by the silence which enfolds them” (Djebar). 

Unlike Cixous, Djebar is oppressed via the immediacy of her surrounding reality. Away in Paris, perhaps Cixous had the luxury to escape the bloody battle. But for Djebar, she could not escape, “the silence of my solitary confinement feeds this monologue which is disguised as a forbidden conversation. I write to get a grip on these beleaguered days” (Djebar). The promise of freedom, perhaps a freedom that Cixous knew all too well, the pipedream for Assia Djebar’s narrator need to use the pen and write in order to get a grip on reality. “Algeria is a woman who is impossible to tame. A tamed Algeria is a pipedream; every battle drives further and further away”; just as the French attempt to tame Algeria; the Islamists, the Moors, and the Ottomans attempted to tame the women. Every limited exploit of identity led further and further away from a subjective self oppressed via history.

Yet even in the US in 2012 women are facing the backlash as Conservatives attempt to strip away the freedoms women such as Margaret Sanger fought for, and even to suppress the identity of homosexuality as a crime, rather than a human right. The recent backlash in the States reflects how far we have yet to come. A free sense of subjective self, an essence, yet to be defined echoes Fredrik Nietzsche’s “Human All too Human.” Cixous’ narrator in Promethea wants to imagine a world where one does not have to give self a thought because one would not have to imagine a self if it had not the fear that someone else would be imposing or exploiting another’s ‘will’. The choice is to simply just ‘be’ regardless of orientation.