After Betsy's wonderful presentation on Wednesday, I've thought a lot about the question she posed towards the start, "Do the colonized problematize the displacement caused by the colonizer?"
The initial instinct or reaction to that question would seem to be "yes." You only need to look at the current mess in Iraq to see evidence of resentment from a society that has been invaded and displaced by a force acting out of self-interest and ignorance.
But thinking about this question just looking at Camara Laye's book, the answer is instead "no."
Except for that one part I mentioned in my last blog posting, Camara doesn't problematize or even really question the colonizers at all. In fact, The Dark Child casts the colonizer in a positive light, and could serve as an argument in support of the West's colonization.
For some reason this upsets me. I guess I kind of hoped for an account that would shed some light on the blatant injustice and cultural destruction that colonization brings. But The Dark Child doesn't do this. Camara's story, instead, provides the perfect anecdote for the good that colonization can bring.
From the beginning of the story, Camara is set apart from his community (the colonized holding on to their indigenous culture), as something greater, something he can only be because of the French presence. Camara is constantly pushed away from the indigenous culture, until he finally goes to Conakry and then France itself to get educated.
Except for making him promise that he will come back, Camara's family and community (a community that still lives, for the most part, as tradition dictates), don't once see anything wrong with turning Camara over to the colonizer. Instead they encourage it. There is no resentment, no attempt to keep their culture alive through Camara. As a result, Camara begins to no longer respect the people he comes from (as we briefly discussed in class).
As an autobiography, obviously Camara is limited into telling the story as someone who did leave and go to France to be educated, because that is what really happened. If he tried to write a different story, one that criticizes the colonizer, he would come off as a hypocrite.
What bothers me most, then, is not that Camara portrays himself as he does, but that he portrays everyone else in his (home) community as being perfectly okay with the situation. Perhaps that is true; perhaps they were okay with everything; perhaps colonization hadn't adversely affected them enough to get truly angry. Or perhaps Camara was just trying to be subtle.
I realize that I don't necessarily have the right to tell other people how they should feel. But as a reader, I would have liked to have seen some substantial problematizing of the colonizer and the displacement colonization brings.
The initial instinct or reaction to that question would seem to be "yes." You only need to look at the current mess in Iraq to see evidence of resentment from a society that has been invaded and displaced by a force acting out of self-interest and ignorance.
But thinking about this question just looking at Camara Laye's book, the answer is instead "no."
Except for that one part I mentioned in my last blog posting, Camara doesn't problematize or even really question the colonizers at all. In fact, The Dark Child casts the colonizer in a positive light, and could serve as an argument in support of the West's colonization.
For some reason this upsets me. I guess I kind of hoped for an account that would shed some light on the blatant injustice and cultural destruction that colonization brings. But The Dark Child doesn't do this. Camara's story, instead, provides the perfect anecdote for the good that colonization can bring.
From the beginning of the story, Camara is set apart from his community (the colonized holding on to their indigenous culture), as something greater, something he can only be because of the French presence. Camara is constantly pushed away from the indigenous culture, until he finally goes to Conakry and then France itself to get educated.
Except for making him promise that he will come back, Camara's family and community (a community that still lives, for the most part, as tradition dictates), don't once see anything wrong with turning Camara over to the colonizer. Instead they encourage it. There is no resentment, no attempt to keep their culture alive through Camara. As a result, Camara begins to no longer respect the people he comes from (as we briefly discussed in class).
As an autobiography, obviously Camara is limited into telling the story as someone who did leave and go to France to be educated, because that is what really happened. If he tried to write a different story, one that criticizes the colonizer, he would come off as a hypocrite.
What bothers me most, then, is not that Camara portrays himself as he does, but that he portrays everyone else in his (home) community as being perfectly okay with the situation. Perhaps that is true; perhaps they were okay with everything; perhaps colonization hadn't adversely affected them enough to get truly angry. Or perhaps Camara was just trying to be subtle.
I realize that I don't necessarily have the right to tell other people how they should feel. But as a reader, I would have liked to have seen some substantial problematizing of the colonizer and the displacement colonization brings.
posted by Kate Merwald at 5:13 PM
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