Orientalism & its Enemies,

or:


Robert Irwin: For Lust of Knowing:
The Orientalists and their Enemies (2006)

The Empire Strikes Back

I guess I kind of grew up on Edward Said's classic polemic text Orientalism (1978), so it came as quite a shock to run across this book in the public library the other day. "Like a petrol-bomb lobbed into the the flames of dissent," says the front cover. (Interesting choice of metaphor, n'est-ce pas? Is it intended to evoke the intifadah, and the petrol-bomb-throwing youths in Gaza and the West Bank? Edward Said was a Palestinian, after all, and a vociferous critic of American policy in the Middle East.) Anyway, whether that's the idea or not, the Independent reviewer goes on to claim that "Irwin is the only man alive who could have carried it off."

The back cover goes on to swell the chorus of praise: "About nine parts erudite civil charm to one part blazing napalm," says the Sunday Times, and (finally) "This is a refreshing and humane book, which will still be read for pleasure and instruction long after Said's work" (Sunday Telegraph)



So who exactly is Robert Irwin, and what is it about Said's book that so irritates him? Well, the short answer is that he's an Orientalist - an exceptionally well-read and well-informed one, too - so it's not surprising that Said's attack on the bona fides of (so-called) serious scholars as well as popular attitudes towards the East is bound to strike an adverse note with him.

He's therefore set out to provide a kind of counter-history to Said's, fleshing out all the things the latter glosses over (his almost complete lack of discussion of German Orientalist scholarship, for instance - and his misinterpretation of various crucial figures and texts), culminating with a chapter-long attack on Edward Said, both as man (not nearly so Palestinian as he liked to pretend, apparently) and scholar (not nearly so well-read as he claimed - implicitly and otherwise).



I guess you can see why I was so anxious to read the book. Any of you who've taken the trouble to scroll through the PhD thesis I've been laboriously scanning onto the computer of late will have seen just how dependent it is on the basic formulations of Edward Said. The claim that my hero has feet of clay is not in itself surprising (no informed reader could seriously claim not to have noticed some at least of the sweeping assertions and unprovable conjectures that abound in Orientalism), but it still needs a bit of demonstration. Irwin, apparently (according to a number of British journalists, at any rate), is the man for the job.

Here's a couple of samples, chosen more or less at random from various parts of his book:

While on the subject of stereotypes, it is worth considering whether it is possible or even desirable to dispense with them altogether. As a leading mathematician has pointed out: 'many stereotypes permit the economy of expression necessary for rapid communication and effective functioning. Chair is a stereotype, but one never hears complaints from bar stools, recliners, bean bags, art deco pieces, high-back dining-room varieties, precious antiques, chaises longues, or kitchen instances of the notion'. (All quotes in this post are taken from Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. 2006 (Harmondsworth: Pengin, 2007), p.280)

Huh? Wha ...? Forgive me for being obtuse, but is Irwin saying here that racial stereotypes are somehow equivalent to different types of chair? That it's as unreasonable for people to object to being stereotyped to as "Jews," "Arabs," "Yanks," "Limeys" etc. (let alone "towelheads," "n-words," "darkies" etc. etc.) as it would be for a chair to object to being referred to as a bar stool when it is in fact a lawn recliner? Generalising descriptions such as "men," "women," "children," "New Zealanders" etc. may be fairly value-neutral (though still by no means unproblematic), but this does not (surely) apply to adverse racial stereotyping and prejudiced knee-jerk assumptions about other cultures, which are the basic target of Said's whole book?

The unspoken agenda behind Irwin's attempts to construct a wholesale apologia for Western Orientalist scholarship through the ages clearly has a lot to do with the author's own background and upbringing:

I sometimes think of myself as a living fossil, for I was taught in a school where daily chapel services and the study of Latin were compulsory for everyone (though Greek was only for the clever boys) (p.1)

And were you one of those "clever boys,' Professor Irwin? No doubt you were ... He goes on to add that it could be a bit boring at times, but then "Serious scholarship often is." In particular, "Most of what Orientalists do will seem quite dull to non-Orientalists" (p.2): collecting coins, establishing chronologies, translating texts - nothing at all of the sinister Imperialist agenda detected in it by that deliberately provocative Edward Said.

Said's greatest crime, though, is his inaccuracy and inattention to these "unglamorous" details: his claim that Orientalism is "characteristically ... essentialist, racist, patronising and ideologically motivated" (p.3) is vitiated by all of his "errors of fact and interpretation," none of which were corrected "in the expanded version [in 1995]". Some would argue that Said's book still "deserves praise and attention because of the subsequent debate and research it has provoked" (p.4). Irwin, however, is not so sure.

Much of the subsequent debate has taken place within the parameters set out by Edward Said ... One finds oneself having to discuss not what actually happened in the past, but what Said and his partisans think ought to have happened. Once one has entered the labyrinth of false turns, trompe-l'oeil perspectives and cul-de -sacs, it is quite difficult to think one's way out again and reflect rationally and dispassionately about the subject. (p.4)

In summary, "The distortion of the subject matter of Orientalism is so fundamental that to accept its broad framework as something to work with and then correct would be merely to waste one's time." (p.4) Which is why Irwin has decided to devote a whole book to the subject, including one of the most vitriolic and pitiless character-assassinations of a dead opponent I've ever had the melancholy experience of reading ... one is tempted to add.

It's a very serious set of charges that Irwin levels against Said. I have to say that I take that "inaccuracy" with a grain of salt, though. I'm pretty familiar with Iriwn's earlier The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994 / rev. ed. 2004), which , while undoubtedly a spirited and headlong read, is unfortunately rather full of errors itself. Freud was, I fear, correct to say that we criticise in others what we fear to be true of ourselves. Why else would Irwin refer, in his brief opening sketch of the history of relations between East and West, to the Greek "victory" at Thermopylae?

In 480 BC an enormous Persian army crossed over into Europe. This army (which, by the way, included large numbers of Greeks) was defeated at Thermopylae and at Plataea and their fleet was defeated at Salamis. (p.11)

BUZZ! WRONG! As all viewers of the film 300 are aware (or people who've bothered to read Herodotus, for that matter), the battle of Thermopylae was in fact a defeat for the Greek forces, who were outflanked and massacred by the invading Persians. I know it was a very romantic and creditable defeat, and that it sowed the seeds of eventual victory etc. etc., but it was indubitably (according to all the rules of military etiquette - quite an involved subject in itself) a defeat. Just like the (so-called) "Miracle of Dunkirk" - the British withdrawal from France in the face of superior German forces, it may have been a propaganda victory, but it was - militarily - a defeat. Maybe young Robert wasn't one of those "clever boys" who were permitted to study Greek, after all.

Sorry to stress the point, and I quite accept that it's very hard to check every detail when so wholesale an account of world history is being attempted, but it seems just a little hypocritical to get so top-lofty about Said's own constitutional inaccuracy when Irwin can hardly go for a page without similarly sweeping assertions and even downright errors. "Strange all this difference should be," in fact, "'Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee". ...

[Edward Said: Orientalism (1978)]

All this is rather by the by, though. The question is whether Said was wrong in his basic claim that Orientalism (both as a discipline and a mind-set) is "characteristically ... essentialist, racist, patronising and ideologically motivated." Well, let's see.

1. Essentialist:
   

   
   Another convert to Islam, René Guénon (1886-1951), was raised a catholic and dabbled with various occult and Masonic groups, but soon became disillusioned. He embarked on a quest for a primordial tradition that would be free of the contamination of the modern age (Guénon hated democracy, science, feminism and anything else that was not part of an ancient élitist tradition,) Guénon believed that in the Hindu Vedanta he had found the primordial tradition but, somewhat curiously, he decided to convert to Islam and become a Sufi, as this was more 'convenient'. There was enough of an authentic primordial tradition in Islam for it to be acceptable to him. He converted in 1912 and settled in Egypt where he produced a steady stream of treatises on the Vedanta, Sufism, occultism and the horrors of mass culture. (p.315)

   
   Sounds like a bit of a madman, no? The picture gets worse:
   

   
   His élitist views meant that his books were sought out by fascists and neo-Nazis. Since Guénon despised both academic research and common sense, it was inevitable that he would denounce both the methods and findings of Orientalists. In Orient et Occident (1924) he condemned what he saw as the fantasies and errors of the Orientalists. English translators of Oriental texts took no real effort to understand the texts they were translating. Orientalists suffered from intellectual myopia. Their failure to take the advice of the authorized representatives of the civilizations they studied was disgraceful. German Orientalists were worse than the English, and German Orientalists had a near monopoly in the interpretation of Oriental doctrines. They invariably reduced those doctrines to something systematic that they could understand. Guénon thought the Germans grossly exaggerated the importance of Buddhism in the history of Indian culture and he thought that the notion of an Indo-Aryan group of languages was absurd. German Orientalism was 'an instrument in the service of German national ambition.' According to Guénon, the West was interested in oriental philosophies 'not to learn from them ... but to strive, by brutal or insidious mean, to convert them to her own way of thinking and to preach to them'. (pp.315-16)

   
   Actually that last bit doesn't sound quite so crazy in the age of the Iraq war and the invasion of Gaza. Nor did it in the days of Hitler, one suspects. Never mind, though. Since he "despised both academic research and common sense," he was bound to turn even on that noble crew, the Orientalists. But was he alone in that? Alas, no.
   

   
   Muhammad Asad (1900-1992) was chiefly famous in his lifetime for his books Islam at the Crossroads (1934) and The Road to Mecca (1954), as well as for his translation of the Qur'an into English. He was born Leopold Weiss, a Polish Jew. He travelled widely and had an adventurous life, about which he wrote unreliably. He converted to Islam in 1926. ... Asad championed Islam against the West. In his eyes, modern Europe, with its monstrous racism, imperialism and Orientalism, was born out of the spirit of the Crusades. 'With very few exceptions, even the most eminent of European Orientalists are guilty of an unscientific partiality in their writings on Islam.' Asad traced the Orientalists' hostility back to the Crusades. (In general, Muslim historians and cultural commentators have tended to over-exaggerate the importance of the Crusades and they often attempt to make a rather dubious link between the Crusades and modern imperialism.) (p.315)

   
   How very unreasonable of them! Modern Fundamentalist Christians have so little in common with the ignorant barefoot hordes of Peter the hermit!
   


2. Racist:
   

   
   One German Orientalist remembered [Hans Heinrich] Schaeder [(1896-1957)] exclaiming to him, 'Aha, you work on Islamic philosophy! But there were no Muslim philosophers. They were all infidels.' Schaeder's view was that the Semitic Arabs were incapable of that kind of abstract and speculative thought, so that Islamic philosophy was really the creation of Persian and other races. Although the Arabs had translated a lot of Greek materials, they chose only utilitarian subjects to translate and therefore they had failed to inherit the Graeco-Latin humanism that was the special heritage of Western Europe. In the long run, Islamic culture, like all other non¬European forms of culture, was doomed to disappear. History was the story of the triumph of the West. After the Second World War Schaeder taught at Göttingen (1946-57), where his ideas were shaped by his literary romanticism and his racism.

   
   I have to say, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... But lest we get the wrong idea about this pillar of German scholarship (how remiss of Said not to explore more deeply this rich humanist tradition of tolerance and understanding!), Irwin goes on to explain:
   

   
   But at the risk of labouring the obvious, this does not mean that all he published on Sufism and Manichaeanism was worthless. On the contrary, his work on Sufism was fundamental and is of lasting value and, as Annemarie Schimmel has pointed out, two of the leading Jewish scholars who fled to the United States - Gustav von Grunebaum and Franz Rosenthal - revered Schaeder. (p.236)

   
   Even the Jews liked Schaeder, revered him, in fact ... Some of his best friends were ... I mean, does Irwin know anything about racism at all? Perhaps it's true that racists can do scholarly work which is both "fundamental and of lasting value", but isn't this in spite of their racism rather than some kind of excuse for it?


3. Patronising:
   

   
   [David Samuel] Margoliouth [(1858-1940): "an eccentric genius in several languages" (p.210)] did not think much of Arabic literature. Writing in the Encyclopaedia of Islam on al-Hariri's Maqamat, he commented that the 'reasons for this extraordinary success ... are somewhat difficult to fathom and must be accounted for by the decline of literary taste'. And in his Mohammedanism, he observed that the failure of Arabic poetry to match that of Europe was 'in the main due to the unsuitability of the Heat-Belt for continuous intellectual effort'. (p.212)

   
   The trouble is that far from being one of the also-rans, Margoliouth is one of the serious scholars whom Irwin lauds most vociferously ... Is he alone among British scholars in taking so scornful a view of the literature he studied and translated so elegantly?
   

   
   Sir Charles James Lyall (1845-1920), who devoted most of his leisure hours to the study and translation of early Arabic poetry, seems to have had similar reservations: 'To us much in these poems seems tedious and even repellent. The narrow range of the Kasida [ode], with its conventional framework, tends to produce monotony, and it is not easy to come into close touch with the life that is so realistically described.' Lyall had studied Hebrew and then Arabic at Oxford, before entering the Bengal Civil Service. While employed in the service of the Raj he took up the translation of Arabic and especially pre-Islamic poetry as a recreation. Consideration of Lyall's career as an administrator and first-rate scholar prompts the reflection that the commonest link between Orientalism and empire was that the former was often the hobby of the masters of the latter. (p.212)

   
   I'm not sure that Irwin quite understands the implications of that little quip about Orientalism's link to Empire being simply that it was a common "hobby" of Imperialists, but I can't say I find it particularly convincing as an assertion of the "purity" of this disinterested tradition of scholarship. However, it's certainly reassuring to hear that "Lyall was a brilliant translator and his translations are still worth reading today. Despite his expressed reservations about the qasidas, he rendered them into vivid, poetic English." (p.213) Bully for him!


4. Ideologically Motivated:
   

   Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) came ... from a Jewish family ... He belonged to the Communist party from 1937 to 1958. As a loyal communist, he was obliged to argue against all the evidence that Russian Jews did not want to go to Israel. 'Through Zionism, treason penetrated the socialist world,' according to Rodinson. While Jewish doctors and other Jews were falling victim to Stalin's purges, Rodinson was maintaining that there was no such thing as Soviet anti-Semitism. He hoped that Marxism would provide the necessary ideology for the modernization of the Arab world. (pp.255-56)

   
   I mean, what can you say? let's explore a few more details about these fascinatingly openminded French scholars:
   

   
   Rodinson's La Fascination de l'Islam (1980, translated as Europe and the Mystique of Islam) is a short and astringent account of the development of Arabic and Islamic studies. He was especially critical of religious polemic and philological bias. His book tends to over-emphasize the importance of French Orientalists at the expense of those of other nations. Although Rodinson welcomed the challenge to what he judged to be the smug self-satisfaction of so many Orientalists, he thought that Said's earlier critique was overstated, based on limited reading, and unreasonably limited to French and British Orientalists. He considered the linkage made by Said between colonialism and Orientalism was too naive. Said's book was too exclusively focused on Arabs, whereas Rodinson pointed out that four out of five Muslims are not Arabs. Moreover, unlike Said, he did not helieve that the bad faith or polemical intent of a scholar necessarily and intrinsically vitiated everything that that scholar wrote. He made a speech at the Leiden Conference of Orientalists where, among other things, he pointed out that the fact that Champollion had racist ideas about the degeneracy of modern Egyptians did not affect the correctness of his decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. (pp.256-57)

   
   Devastating! Said must have quaked in his boots at so comprehensive an indictment! And this from a scholar who himself remarked about Muhammad, "in an unconscious fashion I compared him to Stalin." (p.256). It's hard to tell, but I think that's supposed to represent one of the more positive ways of seeing the Prophet. Was Rodinson unusual among French scholars in imposing this ideological bias on everything he did and said? Not according to Irwin:
   

   
   Although French Orientalism was not monopolized by Marxists, it does seem to have been dominated by the left wing. Jacques Berque (1910-95) was born in Algeria and served in colonial administration in Morocco. But slowly he came to detach himself from the colonial viewpoint, to adopt socialist positions and to identify with the oppressed. He held the chair of social history of contemporary Islam at the Collège de France and produced books on the modern history of the Arab world. His most ambitious work was a fanatically francophone-biased history of modern Egypt. As a pied-noir, he was understandably slow to accept that the colonial experiment in Algeria was doomed. He never entirely emancipated himself from chauvinism and he maintained that the Arab countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) 'are still for us the place of our pride and our tears' and that the French language 'still remains - I dare to proclaim it today - the Hellenism of the Arab peoples'. Having early on maintained that the future of the Arab world would be democratic, socialist and secular, he was disconcerted by the Islamic revival in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere. His was a highly literary sociology of the Arab world, embellished with sensuous evocations of the colours and smells of everyday life in that world. At a more theoretical level he struggled to trace the passage from 'the sacral to the historic' and discussed the problems of alienation and identity in rather ponderous, allusive, even flatulently vacuous essays about the characteristics of Mediterranean societies and of Islamic culture. (p.257)

As is so often the case on these occasions, the defence is forced to make so many concessions and admit so many exceptions to the rule (of pure, devoted love of learning), that it ends up sounding rather worse than the prosecution. We've run through all three major traditions of Orientalist scholarship: English, French and German, and they all come out sounding pretty much like Said's characterization of them. And if you think I'm simply quoting particularly oddball examples out of context, take a look for yourself. If you can find any scholars who don't fit the paradigm, I'll gladly recant.

The trouble is, actually, that Irwin's book comes out more like a biographical dictionary than a well-ordered essay: in essence, it's a long, disorganised catalogue of scholarly life-stories, with occasional (often foolish) asides about how inoffensive Orientalists (and the Western Academic tradition they embody) really are, or can be - some of the time, at any rate. This reaches the extreme of arguing that even the Ancient Greeks didn't really mean anything negative by the term "Barbarian":

'Barbarian' (or in Greek barbaros) was originally a linguistic concept and it applied to all non-Greek-speaking peoples. As such, it applied to both civilized and uncivilized peoples. Thus the Greeks considered the Persians to be 'barbarians', but hardly uncouth or uncultured. Greeks were impressed by the Phoenician alphabet, Lydian coinage and Egyptian sculpture. ... In general, the Greeks admired Orientals, while despising the Thracians and Scythians on their northern frontiers. 'Barbarians' were just as likely to be Westerners as Orientals. (p.10)

How foolish, then, of Edward Said to say: 'Consider the first demarcation between Orient and West. It already seems bold by the time of the Iliad.' Irwin goes on to say:

The Orientalist Bernard Lewis, in a discussion of 'insider' and 'outsider' in the world of antiquity, has suggested that the tendency to make such distinctions is common to all times and all places. However, the distinctions were not necessarily fixed and irrevocable. Though the Jews distinguished between Jew and Gentile, they were prepared to accept converts. Similarly, the Greeks distinguished between Greek and barbarian, but they allowed that it was possible to cease to be a barbarian by adopting Greek language and culture. Lewis continues: 'There is another respect in which Greeks and Jews were unique in the ancient world - in their compassion for an enemy. There is nothing elsewhere to compare with the sympathetic portrayal by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus - himself a veteran of the Persian wars - of the sufferings of the vanquished Persians ... ' (pp.10-11)

Hmm. If I understand him correctly, Irwin is saying:

• that the Greeks weren't really any more prejudiced than any other people anywhere else. They actually quite liked (some) Orientals - admired them, even. All that stuff in Aristotle's Politics about how 'the Asiatic races have both brains and skill, but are lacking in courage and will-power; so they have remained enslaved and subject' is due to the fact that he was 'understandably prejudiced in favour of what he knew best' (p.16) ... and 'not really very interested in Asia or its problems.' (p.17) Got you. When they do say something racist or imperialist, it's been quoted out of context, whereas when they say something tolerant, it (clearly) represents the mainstream of opinion.


• but actually the Greeks (and Jews) were superior to everyone else in the ancient world. Nobody else showed the least compassion for a vanquished enemy. Witness Aeschylus's Persians (which Said interprets, wrongly, as dumping onto Asia 'the feelings of emptiness, loss, and disaster' (p.11)). That Old Testament, too, what a wonderful humanist document! I've always loved the way the conquering Israelites were so sympathetic to the displaced Philistines (= Palestinians). And this wonderful tradition has continued to this very day! Watch that delightful animated film Waltz with Bashir (2008) if you want to learn how little the Israeli army really had to do with the massacres of Palestinians in Lebanese internment camps during the 1980 invasion. It was local Christians who did all the actual killing - a crucial distinction.

Irwin's book, then, is basically disappointing and a missed opportunity for what he claims to value most: rational debate. It's notable that he waited until Said (a fearsome debater, by all accounts) was safely dead and buried before compiling his own contemptible chapter-length attack on the latter's character. As one of Irwin's own heroes, Bernard Lewis, remarked of an earlier attack on himself: "it is hardly honest or fair to try to refute someone else's point of view not in terms of what he says, but of motives which you chose to attribute to him in order to make your refutation easier." (pp.302-3) In Irwin's case, this includes the accusations that he "was not fond of Arab music" (p.308 - should he have been?); that he wasn't really Palestinian (though "born in Jerusalem in 1935 ... his parents, who were Christian protestants, came from the Lebanon and Said, who was mostly educated in Egypt and then in the United States, had Egyptian and American citizenship" (p.278); that "it seems to me that, though he was to become an enthusiastic partisan for a handful of contemporary Arab novelists, he never acquired a profound knowledge of the Arab literary heritage" (p.281); and that "Throughout his life Said was a consistent critic of whatever the United states was doing in the middle East" (p.307 - as opposed to recognising and praising all those examples of benevolent American intervention, such as (to name a few): ... and ... and ... can you think of any?). As Clifford Geertz said of Orientalism itself, Irwin's book ends up leaving 'a bad taste in the mouth.'

Endless are the arguments of scholars. Is it really worth quoting so much of Irwin's text in an attempt to somehow rehabilitate Edward Said's bona fides? Probably not, not just for that purpose. But Irwin's is part of a more general attack which (largely pseudo-) scholarship, the type loved by British middlebrow newspapers, has been mounting over the past few years in defence of colonialism and Imperialism, in an attempt to reject "subaltern studies" generally. Since Said's is one of the cornerstones of this school of thought, it's important that it be discredited. I quite accept that living your life in sackcloth and ashes is hardly useful, but it's hard for me to see much essential distinction between Holocast denial and defences of the essential fairness and rightness of (say) the scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century, or (for that matter) the British-organised coup in Iran in 1953, or the attack on Suez in 1956. It may all seem like ancient history, but it's left a living legacy. There are some very disquieting asides in Irwin's book:

of course, if Said and his allies do not feel bound to respect facts, there is no reason why their critics should do so either, for if it is permissible to misrepresent Orientalism, Christianity and British imperialism, it would not be so obviously wrong similarly to misrepresent Islam, Arab history or the Palestinian predicament. (p.284)

I'd like you to think about that one for a little while. I'm not planning on telling any lies, says Irwin, but if I did I'd be perfectly justified in doing so - because they started it. This is the language of war. Irwin sees there as being two sides: "Orientalists" [= the West] and "their Enemies" [= the East, including such fifth-columnists, biting the hand that feeds them, as Edward Said]. Irwin's book may sound childish and petulant in parts, but it has a frightening agenda underlying it. There is no "Other," he is saying - no valorised opponent of Hegemony - there is simply Civilization and its Enemies.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but has he not just made the case for "Orientalism" as a basically correct description of a certain Western intellectual mindset without the need for further debate?

[Edward Said: Orientalism (1995)]

Three Cool Cats

Right back at you, Jen, and - Bon voyage! I hope Singapore appreciates you in a way that officialdom (at least) has so signally failed to do in Auckland - knock 'em dead ...

I've been debating for some time what would best to do about various extraordinary beautiful little books of poetry which have turned up here over the past couple of months, and then it occurred to me that maybe a joint post would be the best way to deal with them. They do all seem very interesting to me, though in distinctly different ways.

Once I had the title, the rest started to arrange itself quite easily. It's an old Ry Cooder song, apparently - most famously covered (of course) by the Beatles - but I think that "3 cool cats" is a pretty good summary of these three authors and their three curious little books.

I'm going to take them in alphabetical order, to avoid any unseemly wrangles about precedence, but I seriously doubt that Jill or Jen or Ross would ever feel tempted to do anything so uncool in any case ...

Ross Brighton: A Pelt, A Shrub, a Soil Sample
(Christchurch: Neoismist Press, 2009)

Ross Brighton's A Pelt, A Shrub, a Soil Sample is a really beautifully-designed and put-together book. I think that Annie Mackenzie's drawings, in particular, are a joy, and mesh perfectly with the poems.

I've put in a sample page below so you can judge for yourself.

Ross Brighton himself is an exciting new presence on the poetry scene. He's been giving everybody a hard time with his searching blog-comments and general feisty argumentativeness for quite a while now, and it's nice to see Scott Hamilton and various others (myself included) jolted out of the massive complacency of their judgments on poetry. I believe that even Lee Posna (author of an essay on contemporary American poetry in Poetry NZ 38) is to get the treatment in an upcoming issue of the same magazine ... Check out Ross's blog here (It also contains useful details on how to get hold of his book).

[Ross Brighton]

Do I get his poems? No, not really. I kind of like them - they have a kind of lyric music and complex symmetry to them - but I'm not sure whether they're love poems, nature poems, or experiments in poetic word disruption. Maybe all three at the same time. That doesn't hugely worry me, though - as I say, the book is beautiful, and I imagine his work will come into ever sharper focus as time goes on. Will Christie's work made no sense to me at all until I heard her read one day, after which the scales fell from my eyes. The same thing happened to me once, long ago, while I was reading a John Ashbery poem called "Scheherazade". Suddenly all that had been mysterious was clear as crystal.

No doubt the same will happen with Ross Brighton in the fullness of time. For the moment, though, I see enough in them to persuade me that it's worth taking the trouble to try to understand them, and him, better. I kind of prefer deferred gratification, in any case. Those of you who know Ross' work better will no doubt have already worked out precisely where it is he's coming from already. Comments and elucidations welcome.

•
Jill Chan: These Hands Are Not Ours
(Paekakariki: ESAW, 2009)

I guess I've been reading Jill Chan's subtle, understated, contemplative lyrics for more than a decade now. They used to come in little packets to Spin magazine, back in the late nineties, when I edited one of the three yearly issues, and there was always something mysterious and distant about them. They roused my curiosity in a way that few of the other contributors did.

I'm not sure that Jill's work has changed all that substantially since then. There was already a kind of formal perfection about her approach to poetry which risked (on occasion) the suspicion of coldness or distance. She has relaxed a little, though, and it's become ever more apparent just how vociferous are the demons who require this elegant poise, this pirouetting on the edge of the abyss.

In short, I'm a big fan. With the possible exception of Richard von Sturmer, I can't think of another New Zealand writer who could more proudly carry off such labels as "Zen" or "spiritual" poet. Her own personal website has shifted addresses, and now resides here.

[Jill Chan]

This book, These Hands Are Not Ours, is a sequel to her earlier volumes The Smell of Oranges (2003) and Becoming a Person Who Isn't (2007), from the same publisher, Michael O'Leary's "Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop."

And might I just put in a plug here for O'Leary's impressive track record in searching out and publishing the works of just such visionaries as Jill Chan? I do honestly feel that his press (run with Brian E. Turner) will be seen as an increasingly important contributor to New Zealand poetry and writing in general in the years to come.

If you check out their website, I think you'll be astonished at the calibre of much of the work they've put out - and with minimal encouragement from the Arts establishment, too. Hats off to them, I'd say. We need many more such voices in the wilderness.

•
Jen Crawford: Napoleon Swings
(Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2009)

I've already had my say about Jen Crawford's poetry in the speech I gave at the launch of her full-length Titus Books collection Bad Appendix last year, and also in the editorial to Poetry NZ 38, which featured the bulk of her searing "Pop Riveter" sequence. Her blog, Blue Acres, can be found here.

[Jen Crawford]

What can I say about Napoleon Swings, the latest poetry chapbook in an increasingly distinguished sequence from Michael Steven's Soapbox Press? Sarah Broom perhaps put it best in her launch speech at Galbraith's a couple of Sundays back. Reading these poems is like trying to make your way through a thick jungle of foliage, with no possibility of getting up high enough to see your way through the gloom.

She concluded that probably the best approach was to stand still for awhile and allow the lianas and creepers to twine themselves around your feet and start to root you to the forest floor.

Beyond that, Sarah pointed to certain verbal analogies and echoes of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, but also to the vital fact that the dedicatee of the sequence, Debbie Gerbich is the woman who committed suicide after her confidential confession to having had group sex with convicted rapist Brad Shipton was made public by the Sunday Star Times in 2007.

Just as "Pop Riveter" explored the alienated wasteland of a factory workplace, then, "Napoleon Swings" looks at the battle-ground of contemporary sexuality with a dispassionate and truthful eye. It's a poem to be studied and thought about long and hard, combining as it does Jen's characteristic lyric conciseness and precision with an ever more intense engagement with the debased language of our bankrupt mediascape.

I think you need to get this book, and you need to read it. Get back to me on what you think. If it's a sexy book, it's sexy in a really profoundly disturbing way.

Memories of Overdevelopment

[Gerald Martin: Gabriel García Márquez (2009)]

There's some interesting stuff in the preface of this biography of Gabriel García Márquez, which I bought in Borders the other day with one of their special email discount offers. The author, Gerald Martin, reveals that he's been working on it for the past twenty years (ever since his previous book, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century came out in 1989, in fact).

It's a fairly hefty tome, but he also mentions that it was originally much longer - roughly two thousand pages long - only he began to despair of finishing it after first he, then "Gabo" (García Márquez's official nickname in the Spanish-speaking world) came down with cancer. Both did eventually recover, but it reminded him that while our studies may have no end, our bodies do. Hence the hasty compilation of this truncated, greatest-hits version of the biography.

I can't help feeling that Martin was wise to take this approach. A striking example of an author who didn't truncate the literary expression of his Herculean labours is Norman Sherry, the biographer of Graham Greene. The first volume of his mighty work (published while Greene was still alive) is informative enough, but after that, in the next two volumes, he goes thoroughly off the rails. Footnotes begin to breed on the borders of the text, replete with strange fancies which appear to have less to do with Greene than with Sherry's own advancing mental illness (I swear there's one that speculates what kind of a news report Greene would have written if he'd present at Christ's crucifixion - hard-hitting, to be sure, but basically true to the facts. It's not that I dispute that Greene might well have written a cogent eye-witness account of Calvary - just what on earth this has to do with anything in particular? Why stop there? What might he have written about the creation of the universe if he'd been present at that? Or about the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Who the hell knows or cares?)

Gabo (or "Gabito", if you want to sound even more unbuttoned) is a writer whose path has intersected with Greene's on many occasions. I'm not sure that it's important to know exactly when or where each of their meetings took place. Martin clearly does know, but he mercifully spares us the details. What's more important is that both are deeply controversial, rather dodgy characters, with an equivocal relationship to tyrants - or men and women of power - throughout the world (Fidel Castro for Gabo, Omar Trujillo for Greene).

Martin's, then, is a fascinating and immediately indispensable account of the Nobel-prize-winning García Márquez's career (indispensable because it fills in the holes in his very partial and self-serving half-autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale - then goes on to tell the rest of the story). The complete version will no doubt see the light of day sometime -- probably after Gabo's death - but it doesn't really matter. This is the book, and it must have been profoundly satisfying to see it finally appear after twenty years.

[Gerald Martin: Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989)]

Which brings me to the real subject of this post. I guess the real reason I couldn't walk past Gerald Martin's book when I saw it sitting on the shelves there in Borders was because of my vivid memories of its predecessor, Journeys through the Labyrinth. It came out when I was in the last stages of my Doctoral thesis, on portrayals of South America in English literature, and offered me, then, a number of vital clues to my own self-created labyrinth.

Basically the problem was that my series of readings of novels such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), & W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions (1904); natural histories by Humboldt, Darwin, Bates & Wallace; poems & translations by Kathy Acker, Elizabeth Bishop & Angela Carter - all of which went to make up the composite picture of "South America" in the European imagination - had to be somehow reconciled with the works of Latin-American visionaries such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez himself.

I didn't want to retreat onto the then-prevalent notion that all "outsider" views of indigenous cultures were automatically spurious. It didn't seem to be a problem for the locals themselves. García Márquez actually remarked in a book of conversations with his old friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that "Graham Greene taught me to write about the tropics." The Post-colonial, postmodernist version of Latin America offered by the Magic realists seemed to be acting, rather, as a self-reflecting mirror, echoing back the technical innovations of Joyce and Faulkner to a continent and culture which could now proceed to make new sense of them.

Joseph Conrad spent a total of roughly eighteen hours on the soil of South America, which doesn't seem to have prevented him from composing a towering masterpiece, Nostromo, about the complex politics of Colombia, Venezuela and the Panama canal region (albeit renamed Costaguana and Sulaco for the purposes of the narrative). Was his work automatically inferior to (say) García Márquez's own political Dictator-novel Autumn of the Patriarch, also set in a composite country of the imagination? Was it necessary to be from a place, or know it exhaustively, in order to evoke it imaginatively?

What is South America, anyway? Geographically it makes sense to draw a line across the isthmus of Panama, parcelling it off physically from that other huge landmass called North America. Culturally, however, it makes much more sense to draw that line at the Rio Grande, dividing the Norte-Americano United States and Canada from the complex Hispanic-language-speaking melting-pot referred to as "Latin America" - incorporating (as it does) those vast identities known as Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Argentina, and even a considerable portion of the West Indies and the Caribbean.

Yet "South America" was the name which constantly came up - in European literature, at any rate. That composite region of Amazonian Indians, Lost Andean cities, condors, gauchos and conquistadors definitely had its own place in the Western imagination beside the equally equivocal "Darkest Africa," the "Wild West," the "South Seas" or the "Frozen North."

I'm not sure that I ever solved the logistic problems involved in studying so vast and amorphous a subject: no less than a roadmap of a central region of our cultural unconscious. I had a jolly good try, though, and I owe a definite vote of thanks to Gerald Martin's illuminating book for extricating me at the last minute from even worse abysses of uncertainty.

Twnety years, though! I did wonder what he was doing - why the only book of his I'd seen since was an elegant annotated translation of Asturias's classic proto-Magic-Realist novel Men of Maize. It's a long time to be stuck on just one project.

And then came the thought that it's been twenty years (give or take a few) since I last took a good look at my thesis! The subject started to sicken me long before I'd finished it (is it the same with all Doctoral students? Some of them seem to go on to Post-Docs, wallowing round in the same citations and authorities for another couple of years, attempting - sometimes successfully - to turn their vast beached whales into readable books). For myself, though, I felt my mental health required that I change tack completely, start to fixate unhealthily on something else.

That something turned into a five-year flirtation with the 1001 Nights (I call it a flirtation rather than an affair because it had such meager results: a few published essays and conference papers. You can check them all out online here if you're curious why I found the book so fascinating. If it is a book, that is - more, perhaps, like the iceberg-tip of a whole submerged literature ...)

That, in turn, led to my own series of labyrinthine, Nights-inspired narratives: the trilogy of novels that began with Giordano Bruno in 2000 and ended with E M O last year - there's a good ten years of work in there, too.

But twenty years! The thing is, Gerald Martin's hero-quest has inspired me to go back to my own roots and take another look at that great carcass of a PhD thesis. I approached some publishers at the time, but nobody was biting, and of course a lot has happened since in that field, and (indeed) in the whole area of literary criticism and theory. Some of it still seems of interest to me, though - an honest expression of perplexity at the magnitude of an impossible task, but one which perhaps carved a few tracks through the jungle of Western visions / versions / distortions of the Other.

Anyway, whether it interests anyone else or not, I've decided to transfer the whole thing to a website here. It's unfinished as yet. One of the things about that two-decade gap is that it makes me realise how much we've all had to live on the cusp of technology throughout those years. I did write the thesis on a computer - whereas my Masters thesis (1985) was tapped out laboriously on a manual typewriter - but it was the Edinburgh university mainframe, and there was no obvious way to save the data on any kind of floppy disc or other encoding device at the time.

My "thesis", then, consists of three-hundred odd loose-leaf sheets of paper which I'm gradually scanning and collating into an electronic file, and thence putting up online. I'm resisting the temptation to rewrite it too much, but I am replacing footnote references with inline citations,and making various other hopefully labour-saving alterations. The bibliography, appendices and introduction are all up, though, and I imagine by the end of the year (at the latest) that the rest will have followed them into cyberspace.

I conclude this post for the moment, then, with two pictures. One comes from the 1968 film-adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' classic novel about growing up poor in Cuba, Memories of Underdevelopment - albeit linked to an extremely artful book and film, I guess this image might be said to stand in for the reality of Latin American poverty and political turmoil.

[Memories of Underdevelopment]

The other, Antonio Ruíz's "El sueño de la Malinche" [Malinche's dream] has fascinated me since the first moment I saw it (on the dustjacket of Gerald Martin's Journeys through the Labryrinth, actually). Malinche (or Dona Marina), as you no doubt know, was the Indian woman who acted as an interpreter to the conquistador Cortes, thus greatly faciliating his otherwise virtually-inexplicable conquest of the Aztec Empire. Interpreter and mistress - she bore him a child, also, who has been described as "the first Mexican" - the first human being to suffer that particular and peculiar imbalance between Old World and New World, Spanish and Indian, Coloniser and Colonised, which has since afflicted so much of the globe we all live on.

Malinche's dream of spires and churches might be seen, then, as more of a nightmare - but was the colossal, merciless violence of the Spanish conquistadors really worse than the monotonous diet of human sacrifice and warfare which the Aztecs imposed on their somewhat more peaceful neighbours? Who knows? Who can possibly say? Weighing up oppressors and miseries against each other can be a rather fraught procedure.

One thing is certain. Ruiz's painting (for me, at any rate) perfectly portrays this point of balance, the single woman on whom the fate of Empires and whole cultures rests - a Indian Madonna with the first Latin-American growing in her womb. It reminds me that I'll never regret having spent five years of my life looking for some answers to the questions posed by such images of colonial (and post-colonial) identity.

To a New Zealander they have a certain everyday relevance which is perhaps a little difficult to convey to Europeans. Finally, though, Conrad, Hudson, Darwin, Bishop and the others still seem to me have vital contributions to make to our understanding of this conundrum of the divided self - the need to feel remorse for a rapacious, violent past, and yet the equally strong necessity not to be paralysed by such a crippling mountain of guilt.

In each case, it seemed to me then and now, they took a worthy place beside the magicians of the Latin American literary "boom" - Jose Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course Gabito - by dint of the sheer "intensity of attention" (the phrase is W. H. Auden's) each of them paid to this adopted country of their imagination: call it "South America" or what you will. Intensity of attention ...

"or, less pompously, love."

[Antonio Ruíz: El sueño de la Malinche (1939)]