Literature, as Ezra Pound famously
said, is news that stays news. Resonance
of quote comes freshly alive for me when I am teaching American texts like To Kill a Mockingbird, “Mending Wall”, and a poem by the Nigerian-born–settled-in-America
writer Chinua Achebe titled ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ as part of the core
introductory course for the Bachelor of Arts with English honours (at the first
year or ‘freshmen’) at my University in Baroda, Gujarat.
Teaching Harper Lee’s celebrated novel
(1960) about racism and growing up in the American south in the backdrop of the
recent racist violence of Charlottesville and the Las Vegas shooting made me recall Italo Calvino’s
definition of a classic as a book that has not finished saying what it has to
say. Though racial segregation may have
been legally dead in America after the Civil Rights Movement –the event that
forms the historical background of To
Kill a Mockingbird, the racial segregation of the American hearts and minds
seem far from deceased. It is precisely this failure of the law to ensure
justice that forms the central theme of this novel, the theme that is critical
even today, when the far right has drastically resurged in the western society,
fifty seven years after the novel was published
Chinua Achebe’s moving poem
‘Refugee Mother and Child’ made students discuss the burning issue of refugees
that has so deeply influenced the global politics today, whether it is ‘Brexit’
or Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Multiculturalism as a political ideology
of globalization seems to be on a decline and one of the things fueling this
decline is the Syrian refugee crisis and the underlying Islamophobia. Unsurprisingly, my
students brought up the issue of the Rohingya refugees too. Clearly, the poem
published in 1971 in America has not yet finished saying what it had to say 46 years ago.
The Robert Frost‘s classic “Mending
Wall”, published in 1914, too, has not finished saying what it has to say , especially
when the current President Donald Trump has come to power promising the Americans
to build a wall to wall out Mexican immigrants, 103 years after its publication. The speaker
in the poem mischievously wants his farmer neighbor to rethink his traditional
wisdom regarding ‘ Good fences make good neighbours’by drawing attention to
that there is ‘ something’ -probably something
supernatural ( an elf? ) or even natural ( winter) that doesn’t love the wall. I
don’t think I am as good natured as the farmer -speaker in the Frost poem to
ask the President-who is not particularly known for his interest in literature
unlike his coloured precursor- to even consider the fact that the ‘something’
that doesn’t love a wall is neither an elf nor winter, but history.
It is precisely this question of
history and its relation to culture and literature that drove home to me how baseless is the anxiety of globalization
as cultural homogenization (or Americanization). Many of my students, especially from the
metropolitan cosmopolitan (and yes upper-caste) background, are brought up
regularly consuming wide range of American cultural artifacts: from fashion to
popular novels like Twilight, from the Hollywood films to American TV series like “ the Game of
the Thrones”, from American junk food to American social media (
Facebook or Tinder). Or even American English.And yet they could hardly comprehend most of the content
on the first two pages of To Kill a
Mockingbird. Who are the Southerners? Who was Andrew Jackson and who were
the Creeks? What on earth is a ‘Methodist’ and what is a human chattel? They
could hardly catch the Lee’s sarcasm regarding how the white families in the
South could trace their lineages back to the Battle of Hastings, nor could they
get the joke about how Simon Finch, Scout’s forefather, was escaping persecution of the Methodist by “ more
liberal” Christians in England. How is Robert Frost’s New England different
from Harper Lee’s Alabama?
The displacement and annihilation
of the Native American population, the American Revolution, the Civil war,
racism , slavery, the Puritans and various Christian denominations, American
social and cultural geographies that the first two pages of To Kill a Mockingbird pack are things
that are part of shared collective memory of the Americans ended u p acting as a boundary that separates the American
cultural text from the non-American readers who regularly consume popular
American cultural artifacts. In short, artifacts are not cultures, and as the cultural theorist Yuri Lotman would point
out, culture is non-hereditary memory of
a group and it is always bounded (dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’).
The myth of globalization as
Americanization is unfounded- we may be consuming more and more American
artifacts, but the American cultural memory will never replace non-American
cultural memories. And I doubt whether globalization can erase the cultural memory of non-American cultures, because as
Lotman has pointed out, the cultural memory is not an archive or a library of
past events ,but a mechanism embedded in the present and the contemporary that
creates the image of the past and projects it backwards.
Reading and teaching literary texts from other
cultures, from Lotman’s perspective, would invariably involve translation and translation according to
his theory is the primary mechanism of generation of new meanings and
information. Reading such American texts in the non-American societies and
cultures would result in translation and generation of new information in those
cultures. Globalization accelerates the translation and generation of new meanings
in other cultures, leading to added dynamism of cultural change in those local
cultures. This dynamism will be chaotic and unpredictable, not a simple
Americanisation of the world.
[Check out my older presentation on American Poetry with reference to the poetry of Dickinson, Frost and Whitman embedded below]
[Check out my older presentation on American Poetry with reference to the poetry of Dickinson, Frost and Whitman embedded below]
