Disappointment and Rejection

Last week in Claire Robertson's readings course (Colonialism, Women and Sexuality), we read Malek Alloula's "The Colonial Harem" (1990), a pretty much standard text in postcolonial studies, especially in critiquing what Edward Said terms "orientalism." Alloula is convinced that when European men photographed Algerian women to service the burgeoning postcard industry ca. 1890-1930, it was all about sexualizing, possessing, and penetrating those women. Judging by the photo, Alloula has a point. But Alloula thinks the same agenda is present in the photo that adorns the cover of his book; also numerous photos of Algerian women covered head-to-toe and veiled so that only their eyes are visible. In fact, postcards featuring veiled Algerian women handily outnumber any other image in the book.

Alloula, without the benefit of having been a colonial photographer himself, knows the colonial photographer's every thought. "The first thing the foreign eye catches about Algerian women is that they are concealed from sight. . . . The opaque veil that covers her intimates clearly and simply to the photographer a refusal. Turned back upon himself, upon his own impotence in the situation, the photographer undergoes an initial experience of disappointment and rejection. Draped in a veil that cloaks her to her ankles, the Algerian woman discourages the scopic desire (the voyeurism) of the photographer. She is the concrete negation of this desire and thus brings to the photographer confirmation of a triple rejection: the rejection of his desire, the rejection of his 'art,' and of his place in a milieu that is not his own."

Yep, the colonial photographer must be thinking this. As opposed to, just maybe, an initial experience of "Hey great! It's only 9 a.m. and here's a throng of veiled women I can photograph. At this rate I could complete my assignment by noon!" Reading along as Alloula recounted, page upon indignant page, every voyeuristic, sexually frustrated thought the photographer has, I began to get a little ticked off. This seemed a cheap and easy game. You start with a set of assumptions about the colonial photographer--as if there were only one colonial photographer--and read them into every single postcard. And how do you know your assumptions are valid? Why, just look at those postcards! Isn't it obvious?

Later, when the class met, I was comfortable enough with everyone else to say that the book had rubbed me the wrong way. The response was interesting. Most of the grad students are in women's studies. Well-grounded in literary criticism, they weren't at all fazed by Alloula's approach to analyzing the "text" of these postcards--though they were quick to perceive that Alloula could be read as sexist: "How dare those colonial men gaze upon our women?"--as if the Algerian woman were a possession of the Algerian male. Nor were they put off by my own visceral reaction to the book. But they did encourage me to think more carefully about whence my reaction arose. And once I did, it was not at all hard to figure out its roots. But first, let Alloula get a word in edgewise:

“I attempt here, lagging far behind History, to return this immense postcard to its sender.

"What I read on these cards does not leave me indifferent. It demonstrates to me, were that still necessary, the desolate poverty of a gaze that I myself, as an Algerian, must have been the object of at some moment in my personal history. Among us, we believe in the nefarious effects of the evil eye (the evil gaze). We conjure them with our hand spread out like a fan. I close my hand back upon pen to write my exorcism: this text.”

-- Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, p. 5

A Small Essay on "A Small Place"

Jamaica Kincaid's “A Small Place” is a small book--just eight-one pages. You can read it in one sitting, and since she writes so wonderfully well, you will probably do exactly that. The book opens in the second-person: Kincaid addressing the reader directly, a conceit she maintains throughout. The notional reader is a white American or (worse) European or (worst of all) Briton, and Kincaid leaves you in no doubt that you suck. You don't get it. Notwithstanding the fact that you're reading her book.

Because if you got it you would neither be reading the book nor, in Kincaid's imagination, peering down with pleasure at the beauty of Antigua as your plane makes its approach into the main airport at St. John's, the capital. You would be reflecting on the fact that "this empire business was all wrong" and would be "wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their [your forebears'] bad deeds [from which you still benefit, you bastard], for no disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual death would have been better."

In contrast, the indigenous population of Antigua is pure and innocent. Well, not exactly indigenous, the Siboney, Carib, and Arawak Indians having been long since wiped out and replaced by West African slaves, from whom most of the 68,000 citizens of Antigua & Barbuda are descended. And not exactly pure, since Kincaid makes clear that the government is spectacularly corrupt. But the Brits showed them how to do it, so the Brits are to blame. And have I mentioned lately that you suck?

As the book progresses, the tone shifts a bit. It's as if Kincaid, hearing her jeremiad, begins to question one aspect of it, namely whether the Antiguans--even ordinary Antiguans--are really that pure and innocent. She doesn't unbend about whites, though. Or for that matter Arabs, for Arabs from Syria came to Antigua some years ago, made a killing, got hooked in with the government and enthusiastically nursed at the public teat. (Antigua even maintains, at considerable expense, an ambassador to Syria, and you can easily guess why it does and who gets to draw the salary as ambassador.)

But at the end of “A Small Place,” the tone becomes wistful and heartbreakingly sad. Here is the conclusion:

“Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted, there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty--a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, assuming you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being and all the things that adds up to. So too with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.”

It takes Kincaid eighty-one pages to get to that point. The average white person wants to be at that point on page one, if not the title page, if not the cover. The average white person wants to object that he himself never held slaves or sat behind a desk in a colonial office, or shot any "wogs," so he is in no way responsible for the on-going pain and poverty in postcolonial societies. And weren't the Japanese just as bad? The Moguls? The Aztecs? The Africans themselves through their complicity in the slave trade? Don't all human societies dominate other groups given the chance? Well, yes. But you have to ask yourself--or at least, I have to ask myself--whether questions like that open up terrain for exploration or foreclose further inquiry.

What does any of this have to do with military history? It happens that Kincaid thinks that "race is a false idea. It's just an invention to enforce power. So I never talk about race. I talk about the inflammatory thing which is power." She thus has something in common with military historians, who seldom talk about race but have as their core concern that inflammatory thing called power. It's just that Kincaid hits it from an unusual angle of vision. An angle in which Admiral Horatio Nelson, by preserving British command of the seas, makes it safe for British ships to carry British goods, British officials, British soldiers everywhere and thereby perpetuate the British colonial project. Which makes him "a maritime criminal."

Kinkaid writes and gives readings and is, for all the anger in her work, harmless. Give her an AK-47, however, and she would look quite differently. One might say that Jamaica Kincaid articulates with flowing prose what other postcolonial men and women articulate with streams of bullets and book bags filled with plastic explosives. That makes her of interest to military historians.

Kiss Me, Hardy, I'm a Maritime Criminal

Just before the start of Winter Quarter 2004, I asked my colleague Claire Robertson if I could sit in on her graduate readings course, “Women, Colonialism, Sexuality.” By “graduate readings course” I mean a weekly discussion-based seminar intended to assist graduate students (those working on MA’s of PhD’s) in gaining a command of the key books, articles, and conceptual frameworks in a given field. I recently sent a email to Claire (now a professor emerita) requesting her to send a copy of the syllabus, which she still had in her files.

Here’s the part of the syllabus dealing with “Goals and Substance.” Personally, I’m going to imagine Rush Limbaugh reading it aloud:

“This reading course explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexuality in the context of colonialism, with a particular focus on women and gender. European and American colonialism was arguably the strongest political and cultural force of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. . . . It has/had many socioeconomic implications for both colonized and colonizer peoples, including women. . . . We will pay particular attention to the voices of colonized women and to their representations in colonialism.”

At this distance I don’t recall why I chose the course; probably because I was interested in learning something about post colonialism and a friend of mine, Steven Hyland (who was then a PhD student), recommended it to me. But whatever the reason, I was very glad I did.

Too often we see our colleagues mainly in faculty meetings. Too seldom do we choose to encounter them in their natural habitat, the classroom.

My first post in IPMH dealing with Claire’s course is dated January 16, 2004, which corresponds to the start of Block II of the course: “Experiences of the Colonized: Comparative and Historical Perspectives.” The first subject within that block: “Growing up under colonialism.”

***

Had a very interesting day yesterday which, unfortunately, I don't yet have time to describe. The high point was when I sat in on a course in colonialism, women and sexuality taught by my colleague, Claire Robertson. The reading for the day was Jamaica Kincaid's “A Small Place” (1988), billed as a first-person perspective on growing up under colonialism (in her case, the Caribbean island of Antigua). I expect to offer my extended reflections in a day or two. For now, military historians may be interested to know that Kincaid refers to Admiral Horatio Nelson as "the maritime criminal Nelson." One way to deal with this is to roll one's eyes. A better way is to ask why Kincaid might feel, to the core of her being, that the hero of Trafalgar merits that appellation, and at the same time ask oneself from whence the urge to roll one's eyes arises.

The Case of the Missing Mojo

In the film, “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), Dr. Evil assembles his minions around a long conference table to inform them of his latest plot. “As you know,” he begins, “every diabolical scheme I've hatched has been thwarted by Austin Powers. And why is that, ladies and gentlemen?”

“Because you never kill him when you get the chance and you're a dope?” sneers Scott, his estranged teen-aged son.

“No, because Austin Powers has '’mojo.’”

Number Two, Dr. Evil’s chief male henchman: “Mojo?”

Frau, his chief henchwoman: “Yes, mojo. The mojo is the life force, the essence, the libido, the ‘right stuff.’”

“It's what the French call a certain ‘I don't know what,’” Dr. Evil adds.

And indeed, using a time machine, Dr. Evil goes back to the 1960’s and steals Austin Powers’ mojo.

Apparently he also stole mine, because around 2000 I realized it was gone.

This isn’t funny. Stop laughing.

If Austin Powers’ mojo was the power to defeat evil and get laid, mine was the self-confidence and joy in my profession that had allowed me to be a productive research scholar.

At first I had trouble getting people to believe me. My therapist thought I was being self-critical. But she humored me by referring me to a colleague who dealt extensively with instances of blocked productivity. He started off by asking me to tell him about what I had managed to publish in the past five years. I told him. He almost literally kicked me out of his office.

“You’re more productive than 75 percent of the people at OSU!”

So he was of no help. But I knew I was in a lot of trouble.

I had several book projects already in the production pipeline: three co-edited volumes and a book on the Overland Campaign during the Civil War. But once they appeared, there was nothing behind them.

I still don’t know what happened to my “mojo.” However, I did find an outlet that stopped me from being crippled altogether.

In December 2003 I began to keep a blog of sorts, although I had heard only vaguely of blogs and had never actually seen one. So my “blog” was actually a series of linked web pages, which I wrote mostly for myself—I had no idea that anyone could read it because I wasn’t sure how anyone could even find it. A year later I got a proper blogging platform (Blogger). I called it “War Historian,” which soon moved to a WordPress platform and became “Blog Them Out of the Stone Age,” and eventually obtained something of a following. But that lay years in the future.

In the beginning, I called my assemblage of linked web pages “Interrogating the Project of Military History,” (henceforth IPMH) and at this point my walkabout went online.

I’m glad that happened when it happened. Because it enabled me to report and reflect in detail on a colleagues’ readings course I had asked to audit informally. The colleague was Claire Robertson (now retired), whom Rush would term a Feminazi; and the course was “Women, Colonialism, and Sexuality.”

The posts over the next few days will be drawn from IPMH. And trust me, they will provide us a useful lens through which to examine this “Is Rush a racist” question. Of course, the question itself is trivial. It’s the larger issue of the clash between new conceptualizations of gender, race and class, on the one hand; and people who resent the hell out of them, partly because they were bound to piss some people off--that was actually kind of the point; and partly because of the way these conceptualizations have entered the public discourse in a way that has pissed and still pisses off a lot of people, occasionally including myself.

But it is possible that some things are worthy of engagement, even if they piss us off. Maybe because they piss us off.

So stay tuned. You’re going to find this Feminazi course fascinating.

Walkabout

In 1992 I got the biggest single break of my life. I got the job I now hold—a tenured faculty member in what is arguably the best military history program in the country. (My use of “arguably” is completely insincere, by the way.) As I would discover, however, it came with a cost. A pretty heavy cost, actually.

I’ll get to that in a bit, but first let me sketch what made it was such a big break.

The military history program here at THE Ohio State University was the creation (circa 1977) of Allan R. Millett and Williamson “Wick” Murray, both of whom are now among the top military historians in the world. (I’m not kidding. Look it up.) Allan specialized in modern US military history; Wick in modern European military history. In 1988 they were joined by another first-rate historian (and world class raconteur), John F. “Joe” Guilmartin, Jr., who specialized in early modern European military history. In each case, I wince at using “specialized” as a qualifier. All three produced scholarship that ventured far beyond their nominal areas of specialization.

In 1992 the department ran a search to hire yet a fourth military historian—an almost unheard-of embarrassment of riches—a tenure-track assistant professor who would specialize in early US military history. Such positions are rare: most military historians are hired to do American or European history, etc., and have to squeeze in military history among their other responsibilities.

A lot of recently minted PhD’s wanted that position. A comparative few had a shot at it. Initially I was not among that comparative few, more or less by definition: I was a doctoral candidate (soon to complete my PhD) in the OSU military history program. That was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Why? Because academic departments normally do not hire their own students. It smacks of intellectual incest. But the search committee did something unprecedented: it recommended to the full faculty that I should be one of the three finalists for the position. In the past, OSU products had gone to other institutions and returned to OSU, but none had been hired straight out of the graduate program. It was as much a testimony to the strength of the program as to my abilities, because if OSU did indeed have the best military history program, it seemed foolish not to rule out a product of that program.

I got the job. I could tell you stories about that, good and bad. And in various quarters it was bruited about for years that the fix had been in. But let that go. Here’s the point: I was now teaching in the same department as my two mentors, Millett and Murray. We didn’t need yet another Millett or Murray. I realized, if no one else did, that I had to find my own intellectual place in the world.

That was hard from the beginning and it got harder as the years rolled on. My first book won a prize, I got tenure a year early, and by my seventh year on the faculty I had won three teaching awards. But along the way I also got a world class education in academic politics, and anyway the stubborn fact remained that I was in the same department with Allan and Wick.

As far as I was concerned, that forced me into an extended search among other fields, hoping to find something I could integrate into my own graduate training in military history. I came to think of this experience as a walkabout. It was difficult. And although it also had rewarding aspects, I could never quite figure out which predominated, the difficulties or the rewards.

But my pain is your gain. Because along the way I learned, among other things, a good deal about the vexed question of racism, with which you, the reader, and I collided with the “Barack the Magic Negro” imbroglio a few posts back. (See "The Wicked Wit of Rush.") In my next post—actually my next several posts, because I already have them written--I’ll tell you about it.

Line of Departure

We are in northern Michigan on a cool summer night, and we are fighting the Cold War. But we don’t think of it that way, not even remotely.

There are seven of us, and we are sitting around a small camp fire, knocking back a few Budweisers. We’re not supposed to have a camp fire and we’re not supposed to have beer—and certainly should not have been drinking beer on the OP earlier in the day. But there are no officers around, which is frequently the case. It is one of the virtues of our MOS, that we are usually free of officers.

It is the end of Annual Training. Sixteen days, most of them spent in the field. We are National Guardsmen, part-time soldiers, most of us in it for the college tuition. We are also field artillery forward observers, trained to kill the enemy with binoculars and a map. And all we had done that day was observe fire as two mortar platoons expended their rounds, because of the standing orders to use up all ammunition that had been issued.

The prospect of going home is always appealing and maybe that’s why one of the guys begins to sing. The song is slightly ribald. We’re a little taken aback—by the singing, not the ribald part--but we’re feeling mellow and tolerant. Enough so that when the first guy challenges the guy next to him to sing a song, the second guy does. And it goes around like that, one guy to the next, until it’s my turn. I don’t have much of a voice but there’s a song that’s been on my mind and I’m relaxed enough to give it a go. The song is quiet, calm, and easy to sing:

Now back when this earth was a silver blue jewel
and back when your grandfather's father was young,
men of these shores made and gave up their lives pulling up fish from the sea.

While down in the African slavery trade, stealing young men to cut sugar cane,
rum to New Bedford and codfish from Maine,
they were building a wall that will always remain.

Oh, the crown and the cross the musket and chain,
the white man's religion, the family name.
Two hundred years later and who is to blame?
The captain or the cargo or the juice of the sugar cane?

The doryman he knows when the riptides will run,
he sets out his nets and he sits in the sun.
He thinks of his family and drinks of his rum and he waits for the codfish to come.

It's the same goddamned ocean that keeps them alive,
it will swallow you up, it will let you survive.
It will heal you and steal you and take you away
like a note in a bottle with nothing to say

Now back when this earth was a silver blue jewel
And back when your grandfather's father was young,
Men of these shores made and gave up their lives pulling up fish from the sea.

For a moment no one says anything. They didn’t quite expect to hear “Sugar Trade,” written by Jimmy Buffett but known to me by way of the cover by James Taylor.

"That's not bad, Grimsley," one of them finally says.

That was thirty-five years ago. I’ve been thinking about that song again of late. Especially the line about building a wall that would always remain.

This afternoon I told my 8-year old daughter the camp fire story and I began to sing the song. I got as far as “stealing young men to cut sugar cane” before I choked up a bit and simply spoke the rest of the lyrics. I explained to her about the triangle trade. (You may think it strange but she likes these kinds of moments with her father.) I find “Sugar Trade” for her on YouTube—you can find everything on YouTube—and we listen to Taylor’s gentle rendition. She asks to hear it again. We talk about it a little bit more, then go out to rake the leaves in our back yard.

Crash

We’ve reached a tough subject. Race. Is there anything that we as a society find more difficult to discuss? Or even understand?

I promise we’ll get back to Rush Limbaugh. He’s important to this discussion. But he isn’t all that important—not enough to disrespect the gravity of what is at stake here. Put simply, we can’t afford to make pronouncements about Rush and race until we have leeched out the ideologically-driven certainties and found a way to step back and think about race and racism with full acceptance of our shared humanity.

The number of people who so far “like” this page is as yet just slightly north of a hundred, but they hold a variety of opinions about politics and a variety of ways to conceptualize race and racism, and if I cannot speak effectively to both groups then I will have failed.

Where to begin? I can think of lots of people and places, and I will tell you about some of them, because if you can’t speak in your own voice and from your own experience about this stuff—if you deal in dogma—then the conversation is over before it begins.

So let me start by offering a single sentence, pronounced by James Baldwin, the American novelist, essayist, playwright and activist.

“As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”

Don’t leap to conclusions about what that means. Don’t try to understand it too quickly. In fact, for the time being don’t try to understand it cognitively at all. Treat it as sort of a Zen koan. And grant me your patience as I try to share with you the best I have to offer on this fraught, tragic, infuriating, complex, and difficult, desperately important subject.

Note to friends reading this post by way of my having shared it to my personal page. Henceforth I will not be sharing very much. If you want to hear what I have to say, you know where to find me.