The VSI Notebook - Robert J. C. Youngrobertjcyoung.com/VSINotebook.pdfSubaltern vs Marxism Gender...

Imaginary journals

The VSI Notebook Postcolonialism— a very secret introduction the working notebook clandestino

www.robertjcyoung.com © 2007 Robert JC Young

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a book that never was a book as it never was the way it was not secret ● Sara Suleri: ‘what did it mean, to write a book beyond what it was about?’ ● brief: ‘trade book’, for a different kind of reader, accessible format: have to use at least a dozen photographs so, work the text out of the images, write it through them none of them must be inserted afterwards no mere secondary illustration of the writing ● Models Roland Barthes Walter Benjamin, in the obsessive shadow of his ghostly alter ego, Charles Baudelaire Jorge Luis Borges Samuel Beckett, Francis Ponge

I notice that so far they are all B’s… even Ponge hardly changes this intimate labial repetition—until, mediated by the fricative shift of the V of Victor Burgin we arrive at, Frantz Fanon… and Theodor Adorno. for not being at home at home Benjamin: ‘Never trust what writers say about their own writings’.


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-ism: ‘a term originally used disparagingly’ (OED) book to be in 18 sections, on the model of Ulysses geography, topography – mapping the city. Cf. Bellman’s model in The Hunting of the Snark concepts should be like the wandering rocks Use these sections according to Benjamin’s Arcades model of montage, moments of arrested history, dialectics at a standstill. Stutterings. No narrative overall, separate sections, juxtaposed against each other. Each one sticks in the gullet of the reader, the writer, the participant, subject of the experience. Effective histories As you trip from one to another you lose track of where you are. Are you reading criticism, fiction, history… ? each time you become certain, the writing shifts, changes, the tone falters


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Geography of Partition Famine—Ireland, India, China Migrant/Ulysses/Wandering Jew/

Nomads/woman Psychology—internal/external Technology—local—sustainable development Ecology, new social movements Economics, imperial, global ‘free’ trade: free for whom? Life histories, testimonio, witnessing Race—racism Europe—‘the creation of the third world’ NGO, UN, WTO, IMF


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Concepts Colonialism Imperialism Neocolonialism/economic exploitation Language Translation Hybridity—Cordoba, Granada Subaltern vs Marxism Gender Identity History/histories Islam, Eid, Hadj Religion. Diwali, Pooja Nation/nationalism Culture: disruption, displacement Modernity, colonial modernity Counter-modernities Migration, exile, diaspora, refugees Violence, healing, torture Genocide, communalism Apartheid Globalisation Liberalism. Inter/multiculturalism Anglo vs Hispanic America, Africa- America, &c


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Concepts 2 Translation Networks Histories as repetitions Borders, walls, ditches Identities, multiple, subaltern Nations, first nations. Are there also last nations? Lost nations? Least nations, certainly. They haunt this book. Ecology Modernities. Lost Steps. (why do I think of that so repeatedly? Lost objects…) Culture of music, song— mistake to assume that literature is always the living centre of culture, particularly in the context of nationalism. The novel especially overprivileged, in comparison to poetry, which in reality has been far more important to nationalist sentiment ~ Gender. Don’t have a separate section (usually put at end). Bring it in all the time. Each time. Think it through each time from the beginning. Phoolan Devi. Nigerian market women. Women migrant workers. David Goldblatt book--The Transported of Kwandebele:

A South African Odyssey Welfare-to-work/sex-industry, maids, part-time workers International feminisms


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Sections: ‘some cities’ 1 Tijuana 2 Qetta/Kandahar—refugees, camps 3 Jerusalem 4 Algiers, Battle of Algiers 5 Habana 6 Ahmedabad 7 Bahia. Rio 8 China/Hong Kong/Macau 9 Caribbean. Puerto Rico. A Small Place. Black Skin White Masks 10 Australia 11 London. 1930s. Colonial/postcolonial 12 Paris, 1920s, 1950s. Congresses? Colonial Exhibitions 13 Accra. 14 S[ri] L[anka] 15 Cairo. Pyramids, Sadat. Duse. Cities of Salt. 16 Dublin. Mayo. Michael Collins 17 District 6. Nervous Conditions 18 Baku


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you have to speak of those, you must remember… Roland Barthes in the Tangiers Bar—at the moment of the Fall of Phnom Penh The mangoes of Pakistan, India. Chowsa vs the Alfonso Houyhnyhmns/Yahoos Reason --Coetzee, The Lives of Animals Casement, cultural transvestisism (Indira) Gender, sexualities, ‘queering the pitch’, poco goes poqo


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1 Tijuana García Canclini Touch of Evil Stephen Heath’s amazing article, which you could never put behind you. Cars stretch down the road. The point of the opening long shot its seamlessness, no breaks, no boundaries, borderless infiltration. A people slipping across into lands that were also theirs. Ceuta. Melilla. Moroccans slipping in, children being sent back alone, to… Gypsies and Muslims in Granada. Muslims celebrating Eid, in Barcelona—that photograph she showed me. find the notebook of days in Tijuana. Write from memory first.


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2. Qetta Kandahar. Refugee camps. This now I have written on, as much as I am able. Read it there then if you will. ‘Not so much human rights as humanitarian’ ~ Camps Too much on these from those who do not live in them, except when camping it up. Too easy assimilation of all camps with Auschwitz. But they are not all the same. So none here now. Life in fragments. Map of prison camps in Germany during WW2. Camps, like stars in the sky Unable to move. Boundaries as borders, the failures of translation the memories of camp


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3. Jerusalem real-unreal the rock, a city turned into hills poured over with concrete, like grey icing on a cake the wailing wall wail wall wall st bartleby pink floyd that wall


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Pink Floyd. Up against it. ~ Hong Kong, 1960s. In the Mood for Love: love amongst walls, against walls, between walls, passing past each other without touching along narrow corridors, kaleidoscope colours, shifting under the bare electric lights, of textured walls, of cheongsam dresses; restraint, ambient eavesdropping , fleeting glances. ~ Walls. What's in a wall? How may walls have you known? We are always surrounded by walls. But we (who we?) are never walled in. Freedom to be within walls that do not wall you in. How many of us are walled out? Almost all people on the planet live in walls, our walls, that have doors, entrances to go in and to go out, windows to see in and to see out, to open for fresh or polluted air, for caressing summer breezes. I write this walled in by the thin protective skin of an aircraft. Tiny walls in the middle of vacancy. For much of my working day, I work within the walls of an ancient building, with thick stone walls over a foot deep that protect me. Sheer luxury, privilege, to keep within those walls, safe from the world, so that only the memories of history and its scarrings, intrude and disturb me with their immediacy, with human vulnerability. Walls at night that protect me and my family. So I move each day, walk the streets from home to work, from one set of walls to another. A daily life stretched between two sets of wall. I walk the open air between them, past familiar shops, my neighbour’s houses, my children’s school, the local cinema, pub, cafés, from time to time, bumping into friends. My walk is completely


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routine, completely safe. These anonymous undistinguished pleasures and privileges are almost unnoticeable. Yet who, after all, could claim a greater privilege in life than this? Between these sets of walls I walk through Jericho, where Jude the Obscure lived his unbearable life. For him the city represented something so different. Walls again, it is true, but walls designed to keep him out. High walls, railings with spikes. Locked doors for which he had no key. Walls which as a stone-mason he was able to build but unable to enter. So often walls are built by the very people they are designed to keep out. As I walk home alone, I pass the pub now called the Jude the Obscure, my local pub, a place of Irish friendliness, where the community of Jericho resort aimiably and easily—when they are not at the Gardener’s Arms, the Bookbinder’s Arms, or the Globe in Cranham Street. Memories of the Fountain. How could Jude have not found himself in the warmth of the Jericho people, in the knowledges of where he lived, no doubt in one of those tiny two up two down low ceilinged houses with paper thin walls, rather than seeking the cruel and partial knowledge, stratified, of the university, with its walls to keep him out. But this is really about other walls. Walls that are no home, walls that stretch through the countryside of zigzag across the city. Sea walls, prison walls, dam walls, the sweep of Aswan. Walls around the cantonment, the compound, the rabbit-proof fence that was also designed to be aborigine-proof. The Great Wall of China, built to keep out the Mongols, Hadrian’s Wall built to keep out the Picts, that hedge in India, these were the walls built to keep people out, boundaries, border fences. The Berlin Walls now being rebuilt all over the world with no sense of irony. Walls built to keep people in. Now walls built to keep people out. Always built of the hard bricks of fear.


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~ There is a road in North Oxford, the richest comfortable area where Oxford’s upper classes live their lives of ease, where in the years between the two world wars, the City Council provocatively built an estate of Council Housing. The home owners of the road on which it was built objected so vigorously that the Council built a wall across the street to keep the upper classes from having to mix with the working classes on the same street. The story goes that after the War, a soldier coming home to his family who lived in one of the houses on the Council Estate, after years fighting for freedom and a new social mandate for which he had risked his life, rather than go the old back way, drove his tank straight through the wall dividing the street and knocked it flat, into a thousand pieces, for ever. ~ Your wall. My wall. The walls between you and me. Will a tank-driver ever knock them down for ever? If I think of anyone ever reading this, it will be you. Will you know that it is for you as you read these words? I know that you will never read this.


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4. Algiers Roland Barthes in the bar in Tangiers. Foucault and Fanon in Tunisia Memmi, Strangers to ourselves Raï Battle of Algiers. Joby Fanon in tears as he holds the letters. Josie Fanon commits suicide. Those Camus essays—nostalgia for Algérie—blanche. Nostalgeria. Marseilles—its other, doubled on the French mainland, the city split in two across the sea. …


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5. Habana Martí. Tell me about that. And then you told me those unrepeatable stories.


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6. Ahmedabad Mumbai, Ahmedabad, ashram, earthquake, the riots. Communal not community. Hybridity, Ricoeur. Narrative as space of negotiation. The old city. Networks of secret passages and concealed doors. Poor Muslims, recognisable by their dress, and their poverty. Later I wonder which were the ones, living unconsciously at that moment on the border of life and death. Did they escape through those hidden doorways? Acrid exhaust fumes in the brightly lit streets full of pulsating lights, engines of cars and rickshaws pouring out smoke. Taking a rickshaw to the Navajivan Press, stopping on the way at the chai stall by the roadside. Residential areas. You have to be the right caste as well as the right religion to be given permission to buy a property in each colony. India’s modern communalist colonialism. Gandhiji in the ashram, funded by the rich mill-owners. An oasis by the river in a sea of industrialism. Contrast to the rural setting of the Phoenix settlement, high in the rolling hills. Destroyed by rioters and then rebuilt. Acrid air that makes your eyes sting even inside the car. The club, modern and suburban, on the edge of town swimming in its vast lawns. Shopping centres, bookstores with cafés inside, expensive saree shops with dazzling shot silks dramatically displayed, the textile museum, the Corbusier houses, the land for the dam…


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7. Bahia Not yet. Monday Ring S. 0208-311-4281 Send reference Flowers Galway paper


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8. China, Hong Kong, Macau Shanghai and its so prominent postmodernity. The Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Invisible struggle. Lost, visible Tibet. Controlled migration of single people to the factories, remitting to the rest who remain anchored to the countryside.


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9. Caribbean My days in Puerto Rico, in the hotel built like a ship. A Small Place. BSWM. Emilio Fernández, Mexican filmmaker, The Pearl, Maria Candelaria But you can’t write about the actuality of the Caribbean. Because you only become Caribbean when you leave it. 10. Oceana Tattoos. The full Moko. smiling Ainu women


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11. London, 1930s-40s The postcolonial London of Selvon, Rushdie. Visit to St Pauls. On the right, a statue, the figure of justice— with a text curled in one hand. It is the Laws of Manu. I’m more excited by the lost memories of anticolonial London. Taking the tube to Camden and walking up through Camden Square to the Headquarters of the African Student’s Union. Bought for them by Marcus Garvey. Lived so long beside it and never knowing. Mohammed Ali Duse. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Stalin. Forgotten moments of radical intensity.


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12. Paris 1920s Picasso, Josephine Baker, Ho Chi Minh, Nehru 1926 la construction de la grande mosquée de Paris: pour les tirailleurs— la dette de sang 1927 The International Anti-imperial Congress 1931 Exposition coloniale internationale. La verité sur les colonies.

1950s Richard Wright, Fanon, Maspero, Sartre, Vidal Naquet 1954 Fall of Phnom Penh. Barthes. The Quiet American.


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13. Accra 1958-67 Fanon in Accra, W.E.B. DuBois. Padmore, Nkrumah, Banda (but why did he call himself ‘Hastings’?) Che in Africa. Greets Ben Bella. Reads DT. Interviewed by Josie Fanon.


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14. SL Arnold, India Revisited Violence in fact started in 1977 not 1983 as is commonly suggested. Rajeev Gandhi’s government supporting both sides. In Tamil Nadu fear that peace would mean armed Tamils might migrate to TN. Ondaatje: ‘we are full of anarchy’ So much more, but all too close for comfort


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15. Cairo White Mythologies: the image of the Pyramid in which you just see Sadat’s back as he faces it. Nasser’s triumphs Mohammed Ali Duse N. el Sadaawi talk 13-05.02 Arab Women’s Solidarity Association migrants, refugees, camps globalisation from below globalisation and fundamentalism—connection, control can’t separate action from thinking peach coloured sky behind green-black trees, now a blueberry purple patriarchy against men too we all inherit our religions multiculturalism a way of dividing us—we have to glorify our similarities


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16. Dublin Mayo, Shannon, the stranded aircraft. 1916 Casement, Michael Collins walking to the Post Office to Kilmainham Jail. Propped up


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17. South Africa District 6, Richard Rive, Bloke Modisane Nervous Condition Jozi: city centre. the poetics of postcolonial space boundaries, walls, frontiers, permeable seamless of borders abolition of the aesthetic


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18. Baku Matthew: old city. Railway junction. The conference: the allies bombing the boats full of delegates coming to speak Zoroastrian, its place of origins. Temple. Fire. Earth oil, coming from the ground. North-east of the city. Kaja paintings, end of Georgian empire. Home to the youthful Stalin. Now Stalinist architecture. Meeting place: borders, Georgia, Azebaijan Caviar trade those images I showed you


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Commodities tea sugar chocolate cocaine tobacco coffee oil mobile phones jeans water medicines tourist traveller pretending not to be a tourist barricade body Stuart Hall, the Englishman as cosmopolitan commodification: defined by his tea, tobacco, pajamas his coffee as weak as the juice of a squeezed umbrella counterpoint as cultural transformation


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have you eaten enough today? Are you hungry as you are reading this? If you are reading this then you are already likely to be amongst the privileged of this earth. Or are you? Have you ever been the only person of your ethnicity in a room? Have you ever felt that you were not the subject of your own sentence—that the moment you said the word ‘I’, that I was someone else, not you? That whenever you speak, you have already in some sense been spoken for? That when you hear others speaking you are only ever going to be the object of their speech? That you live in a world of others, a world for others? Then postcolonialism is for you.


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Amref --clinical services --child health and education --environment, water, sanitation --family health Langston Hughes, going to Africa, his Africa and discovering that they see him as white. Tremendous influence of Garvey in West Africa—every villager knows his name. Egyptian women: demonstrating against the British for their rights—postcolonial continuity Gurnak, Paradise Francophone = 60s. But assimilation basis meant that it was always part of French literature, in some way. Hence the absence of the postcolonial in France? Ella Shohat MEC 17-05-02: taboo memories GMT—England as regulating centre of temporal measurement globalisation and colonial diffusionism different temporalities via development and underdevelopment economistic terms projected into domain of culture, zoning of knowledge conversos—translators for Columbus


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Burning books—knowledge. Fanon at school --Jean Rhys story --Langston Hughes --Rushdie Rushdie—split within the postcolonial world: integrationists and isolationists. Paradox of the postcolonial is that it involves both. For each always represents the other too much. Cf. Rai—old Oran vs Algiers Flow of funds—NGOs westerners grazing, snacking, consuming, always with the water bottle people in South rising before sunrise and then fasting, not even a sip of water water. diarrhoea, dehydration, immunisation Spain, Ireland --to see yourself as a nation through the eyes of the other, e.g. French/German view of Spain --Spanish modernism after 1898—destruction of history and reformation as a nation. The postcolonial origins of modernism --cultures of lying German: authenticity French: not a moral issue in 18th c


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Mangoes World’s choicest fruit Pakistani mango Most delicious aromatic Thick cardboard boxes with holes in the side, green and yellow Roshan. Delicious mango full of vitamins. Fresh by air, export quality. M&R Pak garden fresh mangoes. Class 1 Raza Traders, Karachi Park Mr Mango. Fresh fruit from Pakistan. Variety Sindy Chowsa 143 varieties

http://www.fruitlovers.com/mangoposterthumb.html


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Concepts 3 writing in a nervous condition. Writing IS a nervous condition! history/narrative translation ecocriticism boundaries—English Patient, Shadow Lines skin, the bilateral sense organ, membranes, permeable and impermeable gendering colonial vs postcolonial power identity: complex identities, belongingness-not belonging disruption, internal fissures, splitting generational conflicts hierarchies and ideology exile, diaspora, home, return language aesthetic, magic realism resistance voice, representation subaltern subject time, temporality doubling, hybridity


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Multiple identities Layering – from original culture superimposed with colonial culture through education, producing nervous condition of ambivalence, uncertainly, doesn’t know where to sit, how to read the (conventional) signs, which language to use. Splitting. Cf. Season of Migration to the North. more a question of schizo culture. anxiety Bachelard’s ‘material imagination’ Wherever SL, then about the blurring of cultural boundaries, inside and outside, each fantasising about the other, otherness within. Conflict, and the painfulness of what Fanon recognized as that of being a hybridized double… glass, reflection, mimicry (BSWM) … existence, trying to live as two incompatible people at once. The negotiation between different identities, between different value systems (esp. for women re feminism where the options often become mutually contradictory, generating an impossible fix). = the experience of becoming white. Class also. Sempre quello veramente te lo dico io


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15-4-2003 So strange reading this notebook this mild summery evening in April, seeing how much of this book, these notes, jottings, imaginings, got into the book which has now become a physical book. As if by osmosis almost, without my being aware. I thought of it here, then I rethought it there. As if this too is a second skin, a secret, shadowy alter-ego of the real book which it resembles but from which at times its strays into all sorts of distractions and hidden passageways. And now wondering a lot about another book, that book whose writing got so strangely mixed up with this one… finito fin end


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© Robert J.C. Young 2005 All rights reserved

Publication history First published on http://robertjcyoung.com, 8 December 2005 Form of citation MLA: Robert J.C. Young, ‘The VSI Notebook’, 8 December 2005. [Access date] http://robertjcyoung.com/VSINotebook.pdf

The VSI Notebook - Robert J. C. Youngrobertjcyoung.com/VSINotebook.pdfSubaltern vs Marxism Gender...

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