The Cat and His Rabbi

I was raised on The Chronicles of Narnia, and that, of course, is where the title of my blog comes from. (If you're confused: C.S.Lewis wrote a series of children's books called The Chronicles of Narnia. One of those books is titled The Horse and His Boy.) Mostly I'm trying to be clever with my blog titles, but I did wonder about the title of The Rabbi's Cat. Though the cat calls the Rabbi master, I think it would be accurate to say that the cat views the Rabbi as belonging to him, just as much as he belongs to the Rabbi. He does, after all, refer to the Rabbi as "MY master". And it is this book read to me as a small child, paired with the way the cat acts, that makes me think the title of Joann Sfar's graphic novel doesn't quite fit. It feels to me that he was a little lazy in his title picking. But maybe I'm just imagining things.

Professor Benander may say this is a simplistic and surface reading of the text, but what what I remember most about reading the pictures of The Rabbi's Cat is how well they set the scene for me. When I was reading Nervous Conditions, or any of the short stories it wasn't as easy to see that the story was set in a different place than the place I live. I don't want to say that I forgot that I was reading about a place where the land is very different, and started to put the characters in America in my head. That's not quite right. But The Rabbi's Cat makes it blatantly obvious to me, all the time, that Algerian architecture is much different than American architecture. I like this. I like seeing a different part of the world, it's a bit like I'm off traveling.

Sfar is gnawing on the same bone as the rest of the African authors we've been reading this quarter; colonization of the mind. I recently watched a famous French film called The Battle of Algiers. In contrast to The Rabbi's Cat (and everything else we've read this quarter) The Battle of Algiers focuses on how the French violently crushed the Algerian movement for freedom, not on how the French colonized the minds of the Algerian people. This strikes me as typical of European/American thought versus African thought.
I've been thinking recently about the global perspectives on the problems in Africa. If you ask Americans what sort of problems are prevalent in African you'll hear things like AIDS, poverty, lack of clean drinking water, and lack of education. If you ask African authors about what sort of problems are prevalent in African, they will tell you colonization and colonization of the mind. I'm not sure if this is because Americans don't actually live in Africa, or because Americans don't like to think about colonization. Perhaps a combination thereof.
But back to The Battle of Algiers in contrast to The Rabbi's Cat. Both stories discussed the different "quarters" of the city; the European section, the Muslim section, and the Jewish section (is there a fourth quarter? If so, what is it?) and the inharmonious relationship between those quarters. While The Rabbi's Cat is short on violence, it talks a lot about colonization. The waiter at the cafe won't serve the Rabbi because he's Jewish and Algerian. The Rabbi has to jump through some hoops set up by the French in order to retain his Rabbi-hood. The Battle of Algiers presents the French as extremely "mean and evil" as Kirikou would say, in that they will do whatever it takes to keep Algeria as their colony, but not as taking the minds of the Algerian people captive to their way of life.

I identified most closely with the character of the Rabbi. This surprised me, as I am most like Zlabya: I'm female, I'm young, and I'm pretty naive about the way the world works. What I identified with the Rabbi about was religion. Abraham is Jewish, and a leader in his faith. I'm a Christ-follower, and a student in my faith. But I think Abraham has spent most of his life being Jewish, and if you were to ask him to describe himself, he would tell you about his relationship to God by saying "I'm a Rabbi" or "I'm Jewish." I too have spent my life inside a religious tradition and defining myself by that tradition. So the Rabbi's journey through his crisis of faith stands out particularly strongly to me. I feel that I should hate the rabbi for his hypocriticalness surrounding the observance of the sabbath in Paris, but I don't. I like how the graphic novel ends, with the rabbi questioning the validity of his faith, but comfortable with his questions. I hope that Abraham can continue to question without being overwhelmed by his doubts.

Nyasha's Nervous Condition

One of my best friends has been suffering from depression for about a year and a half. I don't think she has an eating disorder like Nyasha does, but my friend cuts herself. Ten months ago, on the day after my seventeenth birthday, my family got a call late at night. My friend was going to the hospital because she had written a suicide note and taken a bottle of aleve. It's too easy for me to remember the vacuum of panic that lodged itself in my stomach and the silence that followed the entire issue around for months.

Because of this personal experience I react very strongly to Nyasha's bulimia and depression. I want to scream at the doctor who tells Nyasha and her family that because her skin is darker than his, she is not human. And as a non-human entity, she need not worry about serious diseases such as bulimia.

Since I've been in the position of watching a friend drown in her own personal ocean, it's easy for me to empathize with Tambu as she watches her cousin helplessly. Earlier in the novel when Tambu's mother is depressed at the prospect of Tambu going to school at Sacred Heart, Dangerembga writes "unlike a physial ailment of which everyone is told, an illness of this nature is kept quiet and secret". This theme of silence appears again when Nyasha is systematically rejecting her meals and it seems that not even her family can talk about it. I particularly resonated with this both times because after my friend went to the hospital I felt that I wasn't allowed to talk about it with her or anyone else when all I wanted to do was talk.

I think that Dangerembga is posing a question with Nyasha's suffering. Nyasha is the most idealistic character in the novel. Lucia works the system to get what she needs; she played Babamukuru's ego and the traditions of her culture to get a job and her independence. Nyasha tries to change the system; she fights with her father over her rights. Nyasha suffers the most in the novel; she is physically and emotionally abused by her father and suffers from bulimia. It seems to me that Dangerembga is implying that if Nyasha were not so principled she wouldn't suffer as much. So I think the author is asking a question about working towards your ideals at the cost of your own well being. How far should one go? If Nyasha's family hadn't saved her, I think she would have died. Should she have compromised her principals to survive?

The Inadequacy of English... in English

English is my native language. I love communicating and words. I love seeing words fit together into stories and poems; I love reading and writing. English is the only written language that I know and therefore the only language in which I read and I write. That is why reading Decolonization of the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong'o was a sad experience for me.

It's sad for me to see how my language was used to oppress Ngugi and the people around him. It's sad for me to read Ngugi's conclusion that English is not a language in which he wants to write. It's as if the English language were a mallet used to hammer young Ngugi into the ground, and now that he has clawed his way out of the soil he feels the need to hammer right back. I know English has been used to make beautiful things, not just oppress the people of Kenya. Is English in all its forms forever tainted by this misuse?

Reading this essay, I cannot help but reverse the situation. What if I were to learn Ngugi's mother-tongue; Kikuyu? What if I were to become proficient enough in Ngugi's language to write in Kikuyu? Could Kikuyu carry the weight of my experience? Is Ngugi saying that English is unsuitable for his purposes simply because it was not his first language, or because it was the language that was used to colonize him?

When I first read the name Dodge W. Livingstone, Jr. in Wedding at the Cross I thought it was simply a way for Ngugi to illustrate how ridiculous it is for an African person to seek colonization (where is Dodge W. Livingstone senior?). Then somebody pointed out that his name was Dodge Living. After some thought I have realized that his name is also Living Stone.
Wow.
That name alone is enough to prove to me that Ngugi is brilliant.

What was the Name of the Narrator Again?

That's right, it's time to talk about Nadine Gordimer's writing, and that includes her habit of not naming her characters and especially her narrators.

Of Gordimer's unnamed narrators in the three stories that we read, I found the woman in Amnesty the easiest to identify with. Let us call her the Woman. Gordimer intended for the Woman to be easy to identify with because she didn't name the character: the Woman is meant to be every woman. But I think there was more to it than that. Both the narrator of Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants and Six Feet of the Country are by my standards extremely racist. I was raised to believe that racism is a very bad thing, and so it's difficult to align myself with the Gordimer's racist narrators. The Woman in Amnesty is not racist. Furthermore she has beautiful thoughts. An example of this is when the Woman's perspective husband (the Man) is sent away to an island prison. She tries to image the place where he is, but she's never seen the ocean. "But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn't imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it." I there are many reasons to feel sorry for the Woman: the father of her child is in prison, and when he gets out of prison the Man treats her as a child and not as an adult. But out of all these big reasons, I pitied the Woman for a little reason: she has never seen the sea. And when she attempted her trip to the Island I was delighted as the Woman saw the ocean. "And there it was- there was the sea. It was green and blue, climbing and falling, bursting white, all the way to the sky." It's easy to sit inside this woman's head and watch her beautiful thoughts.

Although I learned about apartheid in highschool when I read Cry, the Beloved Country, I haven’t really thought about the possibility of white men getting lost in the system. It was strange to think about Gordimer's Six Feet of the Country in which the narrator, a white man, is rendered powerless inside the beast that is apartheid. The system gives him power, how can he be powerless? Six Feet teaches me about the complexities of apartheid and racism. In my simplified brain, people who perpetrate racism and apartheid are committing evil acts against humanity. Gordimer is trying to tell me that they are only a tiny cog in the great machine; helping the machine to function because they are being turned by the machine.

Hopefully Achebe is not Falling Apart

While Girls at War and The Madman take place on the other side of the planet, Chinua Achebe's essay An Image of Africa is specifically directed at Americans in the academic world. I've never read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness but if it's ever assigned to me I will know what to expect. Reading An Image of Africa was a less conflicting experience for me than reading The Stranglehold of English Lit. because I haven't read the novel that Achebe finds so repulsive. It's much easier for me to agree with an author that a book I haven't enjoyed is evil.
From Girls at War I learned more about the horrors of war. I've heard about how terrible being a soldier on the front lines of a battle is, but this story helped me to see how difficult things are for the "civilians". It's horrible how desperate Gladys is; she has to be willing to do anything to survive.

All of Achebe's works that we read this week contained elements of fighting against oppression which is something that is very important to me (and to the vast majority of human beings on planet earth, I expect.) I think it is Achebe's excellent writing on this topic that grabs my emotional and mental attention.

It's obvious from Achebe's masterful lecture-turned-essay that he is a very intelligent man and well versed in the world of academia. As a student that's not enough to make me enjoy his work, but it makes me consider to recommending him to my father who is an academic and a reader. I really enjoyed reading both of Achebe's short stories even though they were written with the purpose of communicating to his readers bad things about colonialism, not to entertain. It's quite tricky to write an enjoyable story on unpleasant topics, and I think this shows that Achebe is an excellent writer.

The Stranglehold of English Lit?

Reading Felix Mnthali's Stranglehold of English Lit. was a peculiar experience for me. I've read about half of Jane Austen's novels but this poem proposed an entirely different viewpoint of her work, one that never would have occurred to me were I left to my own devices. I read and appreciated Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility. They weren't my favorite books but I liked the stories and I enjoyed looking through the novels to a different time and a different way of life. I have never been presented with Jane Austen's novels as an evil thing. I've certainly run across students who don't like Jane Austen, who see her books as something to be endured for a grade, but Mnthali is the first person to propose to me that they are evil. It's difficult for me to come over to his perspective, because I've seen Austen's work as innocent for so long, but I can see the issue from Mnthali's point of view. I do see how English Literature has affected the young people of Malawi, and therefore hurt his country, but that doesn't mean I want to get rid of Jane Austen. I love the English language, and I love books written in it. I don't want to get rid of English Literature even if it has done a horrible disservice to Africa.

As a poem, the Stranglehold of English Lit. incorporates language that is more like shouting than metaphor, or image, or rhyme, or rhythm. That's not a bad thing; poems don't have to be pretty or pleasant. This is certainly not a pleasant poem, but Mnthali wasn't trying to write a greeting card, he was trying to change the world he occupies. It seems to me that Mnthali was attempting to get the young students around him to open their eyes, to not see English Literature through the eyes of a calf, but the eyes of a cow who has seen the slaughter house.

English is my first language and my ancestors are from Europe, so in some ways it was my people who invaded Africa, both literally and with literature. I am, however, an American, so I can side step Mnthali's anger to some extent by telling myself that it was not my country that invaded his and imposed it's culture on Malawi. This makes me wonder if this poem would be an even more uncomfortable read for my British friends.