Chinua Achebe:
‘. . . irrational hate can endanger the life of the community.’
‘Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.’
‘Ultimately the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts must be its own and only reward.’
– An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1975/1977
by Adrian D’Ambra
The foyer of the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt. The mirror behind the staircase and lamp in this image is the glass in which Darley first sees the image of Justine. In other words, she enters his consciousness as a one-dimensional nothingness onto which he will project his own desires and inhibitions.
by Adrian D’Ambra
by Adrian D’Ambra
“With . . . the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part II, Chapter IX
by Adrian D’Ambra
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? . . . The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part I, Chapter VIII
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Don’t you see that the potential impact of the internet is to narrow the range of thought, that the colonisation by capital of our interior worlds will be complete when access to the internet is automatic and universal? Newspeak is the internet and the internet is Newspeak! When everything is permitted there, nothing will happen anywhere.
by Adrian D’Ambra
Paul Beatty – ‘Sensing the Dum Dum Intellectuals were dying, Foy had pulled out all the stops and called in who knows what favors. Somewhat surprised the crowd was so small, the three superstars cautiously sat down and, to their credit, ordered coffee and bear claws and participated in the meeting, most of which was spent with Jon McJones regurgitating the usual Republican Party bullshit that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised in a two-parent household than was a baby born after the election of the U.S.A.’s first African-American president. McJones was a snobby negro who covered up his self-hatred with libertarianism; I at least had the good sense to wear mine on my sleeve. He went on to cite statistics that, even if true, were completely meaningless when you consider the simple fact that slaves were slaves. That a two-parent antebellum household wasn’t necessarily a bond of love but a forced coupling. He didn’t mention that some two-parent slave marriages were between sister and brother, mother and son. Or that, during slavery, divorce wasn’t really an option. There was no “I’m going out for cigarettes” and never coming back. What about all the two-parent households that were childless because their kids had been sold off to who knows where? As a modern-day slave owner, I was insulted that the venerated institution of slavery was not given the viciousness and cruelty which was its due . . . You’d rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I’d rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesburg ain’t that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I’m not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering. I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is.’ – The Sellout, Oneworld Publications, London, 2016, pp. 218-219
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I was so tempted to choose another title for this post: a five word quotation from the text containing one article [‘the’], one adjective [‘usual’], the name of one political party [‘Republican Party’], and one expletive [‘bullshit’]. For some reason I desisted: taste, prudence, fear? Perhaps it just seemed way too obvious or perhaps I just wanted you to have the pleasure reading those five words as Paul Beatty deployed them, I don’t know.
What I do know is this, I am so very grateful to the Year 11 student who gave me a copy of this novel as a gift at the end of the Australian school year last December, especially given that I wouldn’t have been more than superficially aware of it as the winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2016 and that I wouldn’t ordinarily choose to read humour. And I am doubly so grateful to Paul Beatty for having written and sustained his satire for close to 300 pages which seems to me to have been an incredible achievement. How do you stay sane in the face of such history, such suffering, such humiliating day-to-day lived experience and, on top of that, how do you do it with humour?
If, like me, you are a white reader and you find yourself wondering just whether or not you should be enjoying this novel – laughing at its jokes, awestruck at its satire – let me reassure you that Beatty specifically addresses this question with sensitivity and humanity in the last few pages in the story of two white patrons visiting a black open-mic comedy night.
by Adrian D’Ambra
Paul Beatty – ‘“A little black boy is in the kitchen watching his mother fry up some chicken. Seeing the flour, he dabs some on his face. ‘Look at me, Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m white!’ ‘What’d you say? says his mama, and the boy says, ‘Look at me. I’m white!’ WHAP! His mama slaps the shit out of him. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’ she says, then tells him to go tell his father what he said to her. Crying hard as Niagara Falls, the boy goes to his father. ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ‘M-M-Mommy sl-sl-slapped me!’ ‘Why she do that, son?’ his father asks. ‘B-b-because I-I said I was w-w-white.’ ‘What?’ BLAAAAM! His father slaps him even harder than his mama did. ‘Now go tell your grandmother what you said! She’ll teach you!’ So the boy’s crying and shaking and all confused. He approaches his grandmother. ‘Why, baby, what’s wrong?’ she asks. And the boy says, ‘Th-th-they sl-slapped me.’ ‘Why, baby – why they’d do that?’ He tells her his story and when he gets to the end, PIE-YOW! His grandmother slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’”
‘The Kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy – its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.’ – The Sellout, Oneworld Publications, London, 2016, pp. 188-189
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cognitive dissonance – In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to their beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values. – Wikipedia
bojangle – A bouncing male package. Usually when a guy wears sweat pants or basketball shorts (any loose/thin material), you can see his package bouncing around. – Urban Dictionary
juba – a dance originating among plantation slaves in the southern US, featuring rhythmic handclapping and slapping of the thighs. – Google
jive – 1. a lively style of dance popular especially in the 1940s and 1950s, performed to swing music or rock and roll. 2. a form of slang associated with black American jazz musicians. – Google
***
In terms of what it means to be black in a white world I have experienced three shocks of the real in the last year. First of all, I was on holiday in Hawaii in the middle of 2016. When I wasn’t out doing something, I was watching as much cable news as possible, trying to track down any information about the federal election result back home in Australia. This was during a spate of police killings of unarmed black men, people who’d been pulled over for things like driving a vehicle with a faulty tail light or bailed up on the street for no particular reason. These events and the reactions to them – including, eventually, the reprisal shooting deaths of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, and the wounding of several others – were receiving saturation coverage on the news networks, particularly MSNBC. Frankly, America looked like a country in the grip of a civil war.
My second, shock was meeting a black American teacher from the East Oakland area of San Francisco who spoke to my wife and I for an hour or two at a beachside bar about living black in the United States. What she told us about what it means – not just how it feels, but how it is – to be pulled over by the police as a black driver will stay with me forever. Her explanation of why she puts both hands on the dashboard? ‘I’m not resisting, I’m not resisting!’ Her fears – again, not just how it feels but how it really is – for her husband if he goes out with his friends on a Friday night? That he won’t come home; that he’ll be pulled over; that he’ll be taken into custody.
And the third? Reading Paul Beatty’s novel ‘The Sellout’ which is hilarious and disturbing in equal measure as its black protagonist attempts to establish an antebellum pastoral idyll somewhere in the wilds of Los Angeles by mapping out and painting his own version of the Mason-Dixon line and reintroducing slavery and segregation.
by Adrian D’Ambra
Paul Beatty – ‘They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
‘The distant staccato of gunfire sounded in the air. The last shoot-out of the night followed by the beating rotors of the police helicopter. The calf and I split a double single malt to take the edge off. Hominy pitched himself by the door. A parade of ambulances sped down the street, and he handed me my surfboard like a butler hands an English gentleman his coat. Feigned or not, sometimes I’m jealous of Hominy’s obliviousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book – that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
‘“Master, I just thought you should know, my birthday’s next week.”
‘I knew something was up. He was being too attentive. But what do you get the slave who doesn’t even want his freedom?
‘“Well, that’s cool. We’ll take a trip or something. In the meantime, could you do me a favour and put the calf out back?”
‘“I don’t do farm animals.”’ – The Sellout, Oneworld Publications, London, 2016, pp. 114-115
english literature teacher 