Here's my struggle: I want to latch on and say, "Right on! Western culture has been a dominating and homogenizing force for too long, suppressing other narratives as they struggle to be told!" But in saying so, I feel I am intruding on a silence that isn't mine, impressing upon the unspeakable/unsaid of a displaced culture. It isn't quite the same as men coming to feminism, the way I see it, because I can stand face to face with a man. I can question him, we speak (almost) the same language, and come from similar cultural traditions. Despite my sincerest efforts and best intentions to understand and embrace cultures other than my own, I can't escape the propensity to totalize.
I think aesthetic distance/obscurity might be the way out. It allows me to receive a nonwestern narrative in a way that forces me to grapple instead of sympathizing (because I certainly can't empathize) or condescending or trying to make the culture in question and my culture the same. I have to meet the work on its terms, instead of pulling it toward mine.
Except. Has anyone read the Posionwood Bible? Does anyone else find in it two almost totally alien cultures that are made distant as their stories are told? I'm thinking of Southern Baptist Culture and Congolese Culture, although perhaps the former is not so foreign to some. Anyway, it's by Barbara Kingsolver, and maybe I only love her work because she is rooted in biology, like I am, but it seems she somehow moves among the stories of other cultures with out dominating them or making them white. Poisonwood is one example, I think The Bean Trees is another (dealing with immigration). This rambled. My apologies. Thoughts?
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In my mind, the problem then becomes a matter of how do you actually meet a work on its own level? If we accept that our interpretations are colored by our own cultural biases and inclinations, and that there is no objective interpretation of a work, then it how can we escape our cultural confines? It doesn't seem like we can. But the bigger problem I see is a matter of defining culture in terms of literature. While the spoken and implicitly accepted culture is somewhat set in place, once we put it to writing, we channel our own interpretation of what the culture is. Consequently, it's not truly a "snapshot" or indicative of the culture you're writing from- just your own take on it.
ReplyDeleteSo, I don't know that effectively communicating culture is possible strictly through literature. Certainly, it helps- it gives outsiders some modicum of understanding, but it also inhibits insofar as we're taking a myopic view of the target culture. The most effective approach, i think, is a total personal submission to the culture. Something like an immersion, where you're essentially cut off from your own culture and must face the new one on your own.
Poisonwood worked well as a not-so-dominant-of-other-cultures text, possibly because it told the story from several perspectives and touted itself as the story of outsiders. The long time span of the narrative and the disparate voices prevented an audience from easily identifying with the narrators, or compelled them to switch the narrator with whom they most identified, emphasizing the permanent alienation of the reader from the text. But it works rather well, because the narrators themselves are outsiders in the Congolese cultures, and eventually in the American Southern Baptist culture they grew up in; Kingsolver thus turns alienation and outsiderhood into a strength of the novel that enforces her messages.
ReplyDeleteThe pithy answer to 'how do we meet a work on its own level?' is to say that we can't (Levinasian alienation and all). As you contend, a problem of capturing a culture through literature is that our picture is static and limited, but isn't that true of life in all of its manifestations? If we could write the ultimate book that could really teach us what it's like to be Swedish, or Thai, or Angolan, or American, what would be the point of a national identity and history?
Expatriate friends have told me that submersion only deeply works over a long, long period of time, and is much more effective when you're young. And then you're partially alienated from your 'home' culture.
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ReplyDeleteMy thinking on relating our (meaning American) involvement to men engaging in feminism is in that both have historical differences. Yes,females may be able to relate better to males from their own culture than to someone of either sex from another culture, but, even within a culture, the history of males and females still differ.
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