“Alas, the West Indian intellectual, according to [George] Lamming, is indoctrinated to see only the monuments of Western civilization, from a British perspective. The victim of such an education wanders in a spiritual maze, in a state of cultural diffidence at times so extreme it reduces certain individuals, in other respects quite intelligent, to intellectual castrati or worse-energetic buffoons for the West.” “The condition is not exclusively West Indian. It is still endemic among African intellectuals, and it can strike African American artists and thinkers with crippling force. In one of the book’s liveliest passages, Lamming, wandering in the castle of his skin, stares in the mirror of his mind and sees James Baldwin. Baldwin, too, has the sort of education in which the achievements of Western civilization loom fantastically large, if for no other reason than that they are the only real achievements he’s had a chance to contemplate. Hear Baldwin, quoted by Lamming: ‘I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations; they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself; I was an interloper. At the same time I had no heritage which I could possibly hope to use. I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries.’ “Baldwin’s bind is real; he’s trapped within the kinds of Western premises we know only too well. All evidence of African civilization has been withheld from him. What he knows of the continent his ancestors came from is a judicious selection of negative misinformation: savagery, wars, famine, drought, catastrophe: the jungle and the tribe. And, believer that he is, he has swallowed all that junk.” “In simple justice to Baldwin, it should be stressed that he is not entirely, not even primarily, to blame, nor is he unique. The victims of the Western weltanschauung [a comprehension world view, especially from a specific standpoint] exist not only in New York but also in Port Elizabeth and Durban and Mombasa; not only in London but also in Windhoek and Port Harcourt and Abidjan. For in the main, colonial and neocolonial education, meaning the education of West Indians, of African-Americans and of Africans within the framework of Western assumptions, proceeds on the premise that the non-Westerner has no culture or literature; and that if the non-Westerner is to become really cultured, literate and historically conscious, it will inevitably be through his assimilation into the mainstream of Western civilization. Prospero can be liberal, philanthropic, even: especially since his largesse destroys the victim’s self-confidence far more enduringly than rude violence ever could. The Hegelian, Western power play, in the end, is inseparable from a game of confidence.” Ayi Kwei Armah “Remembering the Dismembered Continent” Page 194
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 20:48:48 +0000
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