Monday, December 10, 2007
East and West
I think all of us — most recently Amy in the first comment on the last post — referred to an idea or notion or mindset being Western. What do you think Hosseini's view is on Western/non-Western? Does he have a coherent idea of humanism that transcends specific cultures? I had the impression that he looked at his homeland with a kind of hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner attitude.
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6 comments:
What gave you the idea he loved Afghanistan? Overall it seems like a pretty harsh critique. Kite Runner seemed the same. The redemption at the end is very small compared to the suffering endured throughout the book.
I just finished Stewart's "Places-in-between" and I can't get his comments about "neocolonialism" out of my head. He said government (and NGO) officials assume to know what Afghani's want because they think it is what all people want, namely democracy. Yet for Stewart this is just another impostiion of Western values on another culture. And it is currently occuring with less finesse than colonialists who lived with and learned about their subjects in a very in-depth way.
But Stewart has a very different set of lenses. He critiques the West, Hosseini, I think, embraces it. Sure everyone loves and desires to belong, everyone needs an idenity, a way to feel sucessful, a place for worth. But even those commonalities don't mean we can understand the decisions someone else makes inside their context. Mariam's martyrdom (and our discomfort with it) is a perfect example.
I am also struck by the differences between this book and "Snow" (which I still haven't finished!) "Snow" is a story about Turkey written in Turkish (therefore for Turks). That's part of what makes it hard to read, there is a cultural distance in the story telling.
Hossieni's books, by contrast, are written in English for a Western audience. It is much easier to feel at home.
To me it's a little like the difference between taking a narrated bus tour and being dropped in the middle of Kabul without a guide.
Literary tourism, that's what we did.
Oh, I think he definitely prefers the West, but there's a real sorrow there for Afghanistan's fate, like it's a good country (watan) that has fallen repeatedly into bad hands. So many people in both books who had escaped Afghanistan wanted to "go home," despite everything, that I just felt baffled.
My college roommate's boyfriend, who aggravated the heck out of me on many levels, was an Army brat who had lived around the world and always bristled when Westerners criticized practices like female genital mutilation and forcing women to cover themselves. He'd always say that "that's their culture and we can't really understand it and have no business criticizing it." But I have a notion of human rights that runs deeper than culture, and I think we all do, and he did, too, but just wouldn't own up to it. He sure wasn't thrilled, being African-American, when I pointed out to him that American slavery was just a cultural matter, one might even argue a cultural necessity, because how else could America have produced the wealth that made it a great nation if it didn't, like all great civilizations, have tons of free labor in the beginning?
So cultural relativism sounds good but has its limits, even for the die-hards.
I think Stewart did a nice job, in a sometimes too emotionally detached way, of pointing out the incredible distance between Afghanistan and the industrialized world. Three out of four people there can't read. They are tribal. Deeply male-dominated. They marry their first cousins. They have "honor killings" of women. Most live in hovels. The country is polluted with land mines and ravaged by war. How much sense does it make to throw a template of American Democracy over all that and expect it to work?
Literary tourism is a great description!
nice argument back to the boyfriend :)
I was an anthropology major in college so I have some deep "cultural relativism" tendencies. But you are right, there is a limit and its seems female genital multilation is always the end of the argument. Who can support that barbarism?
Though I have read of some tribal societies who do pretty awful things to male genitalia too, so it's not just a matter of patriarchy.
Isn't there a UN bill of human rights? I wonder what it includes. (i'd look it up but I'm late for a coffee appointment).
Regarding "going home" I get a little sense of that pull when i consider my LGBT friends who are pursing ordination in the United Methodist Church, most fully closeted. Instead of leaving an arguably abusive relationship, they want to stay in the church. It causes no small amount of grief, but the pull to be "home" is so strong...
okay I found it. Adopted in 1948 by the UN,
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
Interesting to me in light of our reading, "all are equal before the law"
"everone has the right to freedom of movement and residence with the borders of each state"
"Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses."
"everyone has the right to own property"
Does that sound like a "western" or "developed" idea of freedom to you?
Afghanistan was a member of the UN when it adopted those rights in 1948. Hum.
Gosh, that's really interesting! Thanks for tracking it down. Afghanistan must have signed without reading it.
I wonder if they were closer to that ideal in 1948 than they are now.
Yeah, it's surprising to me that they would be so specific and far-reaching in that bill of rights. In 1948, no less.
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