Imperialism, Ideology & Art

        

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –DECEMBER 2, 2021

Prof Charles Sarvan

The ballet ‘Adam and Eve’, a short sketch, depicts in dance the Biblical ‘fall’ of Adam and Eve into temptation, and the consequence of that ‘Original Sin’. The opening lines of Milton’s epic poem, ‘Paradise Lost’, declare that it will be about humanity’s first disobedience, a disobedience that brought “all our woe”. The ballet is simple, one would say naïve and simplistic, but not without interest. The transgression of Adam and Eve led to such misery as humanity has endured over the centuries. (In Buddhism and Hinduism, present suffering is not due to ancestral sin in the distant past but is the consequence of one’s own misdeeds in an earlier existence though, unfortunately, we have no knowledge at all of that previous birth.) Whether generations of human beings should suffer for the one sin of their distant ancestors, leads to theology: an area that is terra incognita to me. I here merely share some thoughts arising from seeing this ballet. It’s up to the reader to agree, modify or disagree and reject.

In what follows, I use the conventional but inaccurate division into ‘white’ and (all those who are not white) ‘black’. The paper we write on is white: there are no white people. “The so-called white races are really pinko-grey”: E M Forster,  ‘A Passage to India’ (1924). Jeffrey Boakye, in his ‘Black Listed’ offers “pinkish beige”. No matter how dark my skin is, it is not black (Boakye). In this ballet, Adam and Eve are white while the negative forces unleashed are all African. What’s more, they are Africans of past representation: savage, atavistic, lusting to possess white female bodies. This last motif was seized upon, deepened and spread by the Ku Klux Klan, with horrific consequences for African American men, youths and even boys. That powerful and poisonous silent film of 1915, ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (original title: ‘The Clansman’), comes to mind. In these times of token, or at least pretended, ‘political correctness’, the ballet is surprising.

By way of an analogy, I turn to language. In 1887, Polish Zamenhof constructed Esperanto and hoped it would become the world’s auxiliary language: the word Esperato is derived from “one who hopes”. Though Esperanto did not gain anything like the currency its creator had hoped for, today in the English language, we have a living Esperanto. One no longer refers to ‘native speakers’ but to the ‘first language’ of a person or group.  By ‘first’ in this context is meant not biographical chronology but that language in which a person is best able to express herself. (Bilinguals do so in two languages.) Seen in this light, English is the first language for many in many different parts of the world. Christianity is a world religion, and no one country or people should claim special rights and status over it. Similarly, if English today is the world’s language then, contrary to what is claimed (and often obtains) no one variety should lay claim to authenticity and superiority. (Unfortunately, “English” refers both to a people and to a language. Indians don’t speak a language known as Indian etc.) Besides, not all so-called ‘native speakers’ have native-speaker competence in the language. As one who once lived in England and still is a British citizen; as one who has taught English in England, I know this at first-hand. The insecurity and inferiority expressed in James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ – “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” – is now mostly gone. Chinua Achebe in his essay ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ was emphatic that he did not want to write like a native speaker: he wanted to write like an African, a Nigerian. “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use” (ibid). In another essay, titled ‘Colonialist criticism’, Achebe wrote: Let every people bring their gifts, and humankind “will be all the richer for the variety and distinctiveness of the offerings”. Yet some varieties of English are regarded as being superior: (a) on non-linguistic grounds and (b) even by those who do not speak that ‘superior’ variety. Turning yet again to Achebe, in the essay, ‘The novelist as teacher’, he writes that if he were God, he would regard it as the worst of sins the acceptance and internalisation of inferiority (by the non-white world).

English is the world’s lingua franca because it was the language of an imperial and colonising power. Earlier, it was Latin, the language of imperial Rome, and scholars in Europe wrote and corresponded with each other in Latin. For example, Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (1516) was written in Latin.  And, as with language, so too with religion and colour. “Christianity, the religion of a small group in an obscure part of the Roman Empire, became a world religion when persecution shaded into toleration and, finally, to conversion: imperial Roman territories followed suit with the Emperor Augustine sending Christian missionaries to England in 597 CE” (Sarvan, ‘The English Language’, Colombo Telegraph, 7 August 2019). Christ and his disciples were Jews but the religion was taken over and spread by the imperial West, particularly by Britain, France and, in South America, Spain. In short, Christianity was brought to the non-Western world as a Western, white religion. (The situation is now different, and there are instances of non-Westerners doing missionary work in the West, exporting what was originally imported.) The Bible tells us: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Though there are many “images” of humanity, the Christian image of god was white. (In representations of the Buddha in colour, he is invariably white.) For example, a casual search in Google will yield many representations of the Virgin Mary. Particularly in Renaissance and Baroque art, she is often ‘pure’ white, has blond hair and blue eyes. The Virgin was made European, and there is little trace, if any, of her Jewish, Middle Eastern, origin. In a thought-provoking short story, ‘The Black Madonna’, Doris Lessing relates how an Italian prisoner-of-war in Africa does otherwise in what he creates. He argues that the Virgin was a peasant: “This is a peasant. Black Madonna for black country”. God created man in his image and, in turn, Europeans created God in their (white) image. Having done so, they used that identification to bolster and project their conviction of superiority. Technological and military superiority was taken also to mean moral and spiritual superiority. Though we all originated in Africa, it was thought that white was the norm, the default setting, to use computer jargon. Non-white peoples did not have the confidence and courage to picture god in their image (as white people had done and do). Even as god had made them in his image, non-white people did not make god in their image. On the contrary, accepting the valuation of the West, non-white people built a hierarchy based on degrees of pigmentation. Lighter-skinned folk looked down upon those who were darker. Vijay Prashard, in ‘The Karma of Brown Folk’ writes of his fellow Asians in the USA distancing themselves from Africans in an attempt to gain acceptance from white America. They do not think that “Black is beautiful”.

This ballet, ‘Adam and Eve’, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces prejudices one had hoped were of the past. However, the final scene is of ‘white’ Eve being rescued from the ‘black’ Africans by an enigmatic angel: male, with glowing white wings. As far as I can make out, the angel is neither fully white nor fully black. Whether thematic significance is intended here in the ambiguity, in the ‘neither nor’ of the figure and, if so, what it could mean, I leave to the reader.

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