R IC H A R D M O C K PRINTS FROM THE OP ED PAGES of the NEW YORK TIMES 1980 through 1986 60 SIGNED LINOCUTS ARCHIVALLY BOXED "They don 7 need words to make their point; their expressionist brand of trenchant social commentary is complete unto itself. " —Mark Power Washington Post $5000 Creative Zone NY Residents add 8.25% tax 149 W 27 St NYC 10001 (212) 255-3366 ANSEL ADAMS, MARK ROTHKO WILLIAM T. WILEY, JOAN BROWN RICHARD DIEBENKORN, CLYFFORD STILL, ANNIE LIEBOVITZ ROBERT HUDSON, RON DAVIS DOROTHEA LANGE ... ... just a few of the artists who, as teachers or students, have helped make SfA I one of the world’s most outstanding colleges of art. JOIN A GREAT TRADITION. Contact the Admissions Office for information about BFA, MFA and Non-Degree programs: SFAI San Francisco Art Institute Admissions Box 8—800 Chestnut Street San Francisco, CA 94133 (415)771-7020 “More absorbing than any thriller, and Richardson preserves a deft balance between inner and outer experience.... a splendidly written book, handsomely designed and illustrated by Barry Moser and worthy of a place on the bookshelf near Walden. ”—Boston Globe “Absorbing and sparklingly fresh biography... we see Thoreau perhaps more vividly than ever before, as traveler of the mind, significant thinker and likable man.” —Publishers Weekly $25.00 at bookstores or order toll-free 800-822-6657. Visa dr Mastercard only. University of California Press Berkeley 94720 Clinton St. Quarterly “Richardson has done his historical homework.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review THOREAU A Life of the by Robert D. Richardson Designed and Illustrated by Barry Moser UM Opening Exhibition 1986 RICHARD STANKIEWICZ VITO ACCONCI BILL & MARY BUCHEN ROSEMARIE CASTORO MARK DI SUVERO MEL EDWARDS LAUREN EWING LINDA FLEMING RICHARD MOCK OWEN MORREL SAL ROMANO FLORENCE NEAL PAUL PAPPAS SCOTT PFAFFMAN WILLIAM TUCKER Socrates Sculpture Space is dedicated to Socrates in his search for the truth.
VOL 8. NO 4. WINTER 1986 S T A F F ^X-editors David Milholland Lenny Dee Associate Editors Jim Blashfield, Michael Helm Paul Loeb Washington State Coordinator Judy Bevis Art Direction David Milholland . Design Tim Braun Guest Designers Candace Bieneman, Jim Blashfield Reed Darmon Cover Preparation Sharon Niemczyk . Cover Photographer Bill Bachhuber Ad Sales—Oregon Dru Duniway, Rhonda Kennedy Ad Sales—Washington Judy Bevis. Deborah Goldhaft Ad Production Coordinator Stacey Fletcher M Production Jane Jovett, Joyce Fletcher Liz Towill Camerawork Tim Braun, Laura Di Trapani Typesetting Archetype, Harrison Typesetting, lnc„ Lee Emmett, 4M, Sherry Swain Proofreading Steve Cackley Office Assistant Michele Hall Contributing Artists Jim Blashfield, TimBraun, John Callahan Susan Gofstein, Gregory Grenon Fay Jones, Stephen Lefiar Carel Moiseiwitsch, Henk Pander Jana Rekosh, Will Spray Steve Winkenwerder Intern Lianne Hirabayashi Printing Tualatin-Yamhill Press Thanks Andy Allen, Dave Ball, Rachel Bishop Edward/Nafalle Diener, Jeannine Edelblut Steve Hood, William Jamison, Craig Karp Deborah Levin, Peggy Lindquist Theresa Marquez, Melissa Marsland Doug Milholland, Kevin Mulligan Bill Nagel, Jan Micholson, John Pickett Laura Vemum, John Wanberg The Clinton 500 ON THE COVER Cover—Tom Cramer Artist Cramer lives in Portland where his totems and paintings can be seen at the Jamison- Thomas Gallery. Sketch by Stephen Lefiar. Out of Africa—Rob Nixon The recent film provides a springboard for a look at Kenya's colonial relationships. A V Coyote and Monkey in Bali—Rick Rubin The North American trickster gets into further mischief with his Far Eastern nemesis. Luna de Miel—Mamie Mueller A honeymooning couple finds a strange new world on a return visit to Ecuador. The term neo-colonialism surfaced some 20 years ago, to describe the status of many Third World nations after the breakup of the European empires. Though Britain, for example, continues to hold such bastions as Hong Kong and the Falklands, the post-WWII political reality is totally altered. Ex-colonies, however, soon found themselves dependent again on the very nations who'd ushered in their manumission, dependent more economically than politically. Thus neo-colonialism. A less-discussed form of neo-colonialism has emerged in the twilight days of the Reagan era. The United States boomed with its immense world poistion after the war, and the entire nation found itself growing at such a rate that only isolated pockets such as Appalachia and minority America failed to benefit from the overall prosperity. True there were recessions, but the 1950s and '60s saw the U.S. bristling with power and largely unchallenged in the economic sphere. Throughout this era, the rising wages of working-class Americans were a major stimulant to the national economy. The rise of Japan, its allies in the Far East, and most of Europe to economic parity with the U.S. has opened our nation to competition it had not prepared to face. Now, large sections of the U.S. have themselves fallen out of the national co-prosperity sphere. Both producers of capital-intensive manufactured goods [automobiles, farm equipment, major appliances) and raw-materials [wood and agricultural products, oil, minerals) find themselves buffeted by international competition and high costs. Thus locales as disparate as Detroit, Houston and Portland, Oregon are watching their basic economic underpinnings reel. Financial centers such as Los Angeles and New York have largely ridden out the storm, partially through a disinvestment in the U.S. in search of low-wage opportunities abroad. The Pacific Northwest, our home base, is sorelypressed to maintain wage end employment levels. Most of its basic industries have floundered throughout the 1980s. Only Boeing, the military installations and those portions of the computer industry strongly linked to the N T E N T S Christmas Gifts for Chickens—Jim Blashfield, Will Spray & Steve Winkenwerder For those concerned about making an impression on a plucky friend. 1976 Soon I Shall Be Released—Sharon Doubiago A bittersweet memory of the night Jimmy Carter was elected from one of the West’s finest poets. Body Surfer—John Sinclair A quirky young man lets us into his living room ...a gripping tale. Man Oh Man—Leanne Grabel A disquieting conversation with a modern Marine. military buildup have escaped the long Reagan downturn. The wood products industry has waited for a trickle that never came. Few agricultural producers have stayed on top of credit and land costs incurred in the inflationary 70s. Commodity prices are stagnant. Outside of a growing service economy at low or minimum wages—this concentrated in a few urban, suburban and recreation centers—most communities have slumped into a lingering malaise. No end in sight. Unions are being closed out of company after company, store after store. Many businesses especially those owned by outside investors, have folded up shop. One popular effort to attack the situation has been to search out investment from the Far East. Despite some success, the impact has been slight. Wages paid are seldom even near previous union levels. True, the entire West Coast economy will increasingly reflect its proximity to the Orient. But the transition will be gradual. A more significant though longer-term strategy will arise from increased fragmentation of the U.S. economy. To escape neo-colonialism, capital will have to be generated and controlled regionally. This will require legal structures not yet in place. And products will have to compete no less on the international market than the national. Indeed many regional groups [the Washington State Apple Commission is a prime example) are now doing very effective marketing worldwide. Neo-colonies such as Oregon, Washington, Northern California (even British Columbia) are going to find links to eastern U.S. and Canadian financial and governmental centers diminishing as they become more self-reliant and intertwined regionally. Nuclear Christmas—John Callahan Our favorite cartoonist gives us a glowing version of an old chestnut. The Emergent Economy—Paul Hawken Our declining industrial economy is being replaced before our eyes. This story helps us understand (and prepare for) its replacement. £ Intervention in Vietnam and Central America—Noam Chomsky An analysis not permitted in most polite publications. The Clinton St. Quarterly is published in both Oregon and Washington editions by CSQ—a project of Out of the Ashes Press. Oregon address: P.O. Box 3588, Portland, OR 97208, (503) 222 6039; Washington Address: 1520 Western Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101, (206)682 2404. Unless otherwise noted, all contents copyright© 1986, Clinton St. Quarterly. The first evidence of this shift is still fragmentary. The Northwest Is at growing odds with national policy on a number of fronts. One case in point is the growing dissatisfaction with the federal decision to designate the Hanford Nuclear Reservation as a final candidate to become the repository for the entire nation’s nuclear wastes. And despite a real dependence on defense spending, especially in Washington state, strong support for the anti-nuclear positions of Seattle’s recently demoted Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen is emerging from across the region. Such anti- federal, anti-papist dissent is but the tip of the iceburg. Throughout its eight-year history, the Clinton St. Quarterly has played an active part in shaping and reflecting such opinion. As a regional publication with an internationalist viewpoint, with this, our first national-international edition, we offer you a chance to experience a new perspective. One unencumbered with obligations to traditional parties and economic interests. You are invited to grow with one of the most exciting publications of our time. We hope to both challenge and entertain you as we jointly set out to make a world in which we all want to live. DM
Colonialism is the habit of knowing what is good for others and seeing that they get it. Elspeth Huxley By Rob Nixon Illustration by Jana Rekosh months back, in the upper-crusty British magazine Harper’s and Queen, I came across a feature celebrating those places around the globe where expats continue to uphold the standards of “gracious colonial living.” Hong Kong and Singapore were named, as was Dubai, but Kenya held pride of place. There, we are told, it is still possible to live in dashing style if certain details are attended to: Servants: Kikuyu cooks and houseboys are the cleverest, but Luos ensure a more peaceful (if less well-run) establishment. The dream is still of the handsome Somalis who always ran the grandest houses. Key lingo: Lete—bring (as in “Lete gin and tonic”); Mbwa kali—fierce dog. Essential reading: James Fox, Baroness Blixen, Elspeth Huxley. Essential viewing: The Flame Trees of Thika. By now the list should be amended to include, as obligatory viewing, Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa which this April won the Academy Award for best picture. The trumpeting of imperial triumph, though never exactly stilled, did for a while grow muffled. Between 1947 and 1980, forty-nine British territories became independent. And by the eighties, the once-sprawling British empire had been whittled down—if one excepts the five million or so inhabitants of Hong Kong—to one hundred fifty thousand colonial subjects dotted about on some two hundred islands. Gibraltar, St. Helena, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks & Caicos Islands, Ascension Island, the Falklands. . .the merest confetti of empire. During the era of decolonization, history which had hitherto been told from the standpoint of the victors began to be retold from that of the (not altogether) vanquished. New international voices were heard. Aime Cesaire, C.L.R. James, Basil Davidson, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Eric Williams and others started to put together remedial histories chronicling the plunder. But now the redressing of history is itself being redressed, and imperial chic threatens to leave no room for imperial shame. More concertedly than ever, the British are recalling that they were formerly great and seeing to it, on TV, in film and in print, that the dulled image of empire is burnished once more. India was conscripted first for the restored empire of the imagination: in A Passage to India, Gandhi, The Jewel in the Crown, The Far Pavilions, Mountbatten, Viceroy of India. But the brassy tones of Harper’s and Queen foretold what Out of Africa was to make obvious: Kenya (alias “Africa”) now too has been pressed into the ranks of a rehabilitated empire. If America has today stepped into Britain’s imperial shoes and is walking abroad more confidently than ever, it still lacks a strong national image of empire and is borrowing from a presently enfeebled Britain the glorious style that once went with possession of the earth. In Out of Africa that identification is less vicarious and moves closer to something more openly American. Pollack's Out of Africa, while feeding off a tradition of Anglophilia, is less wholeheartedly British than any of the Indian endeavors. V -A ut of Africa is at first glance an improbable commercial success.- A somewhat obscure Danish writer who ran a failed coffee farm in East Africa in the 1920s seems scarcely a powerful enough subject for a film that would gross $27 million in its first three weeks. And one that would bring in its train a retinue of titles: a combined edition of Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, Blixen’s Letters from Africa, Judith Thurman's biography, a Sierra Club pictorial edition—Isak Dinesen's Africa: Images of the Wild Continent from the Writer’s Life and Words—and Errol Trzebinski’s Silence Will Speak, the story of Denys Finch Hatton’s life, centered on his romance with Blixen. But the plangent “I had a farm in Africa” that opens Pollack’s film resonates with a fine aristocracy of the imagination that is the film's style and its allure. Pollack’s empire, like Blixen’s, 4 Clinton St. Quarterly
is one of taste, graced with a visual and a spiritual largesse. In East Africa, Finch Hatton and Bror Blixen were two of the greatest white hunters of their era. While their passion for hunting was admired and shared by Karen Blixen, itwas imperative to her that husband and lover be not merely adventurers but aristocrats to the core. She was obsessed with “brilliant breeding” and the style that went with it, and her unalloyedly aristocratic values provide the key both to her choice in male companionship and to her attitudes to the Africans and the continent itself. In the film, as in the memoirs, the Africa “she knew” takes the fanciful shape of an ally in her battle against the corrupting of the patrician spirit. Resigned to her unrequited passion for Bror’s brother, Blixen embarked in 1914 for “parts unknown.” She was aware that in marrying Bror on arrival in Kenya she would be trading her money for a title and a man she could not love. But she so reviled the bourgeoisie that the exchange seemed a fair one. Likewise, at her divorce from Bror, it was the possibility of having to forgo the Baroness in her name that caused Blixen the greatest dismay. In her view, the frank materialism of Europe’s merchant class had cramped the more high-minded ways of the upper- class elite. This bourgeois encroachment was far less advanced in Kenya, but she recoiled from every sign of it. If sectors of settler society ostracized her (parBy the eighties, the once-sprawling British empire had been whittled down—if one excepts Hong Kong—to one hundredfifty thousand colonial subjects dotted about on some two hundred islands. . . the merest confetti of empire. ticularly during the First World War) because they doubted her loyalty to the British Crown, Blixen, for her part, kept aloof from the “small” settlers, the shopkeepers and the clerks of empire. Property—as an expression of spirit—was to take precedence over profit. She scraped together a sense of belonging by holding to an aristocratic idea of Africa, with her farm, elevated in altitude and spirit, as the distilled essence of that idea. Her coffee estate was a financial calamity partly through ill luck, but also, it must be said, because she was at heart a good aristocrat and a poor entrepreneur. J ^U x e n was won over to Kenya because it had the power to palliate her ache for a vanishing aristocratic age. For her, Africa was ah escape from modern Europe and, paradoxically, for that very reason, she was blind to it as anything more than a stage of European history. It was a vast game reserve where the values of the ancien regime could live on. The aristocratic inhabitants of this world were not only the imported earls and baronesses but the Africans themselves: “Here were Lord Delamere and Hassan, Berkeley Cole and Jama, Denys Finch Hatton and Bilea, and I myself and Farah. We were the people who, wherever we went, were followed, at a distance of five feet, by those noble, vigilant and mysterious shadows.” An illuminating comparison can be made with Evelyn Waugh, who visited Kenya in 1931—the very year Blixen’s sojourn in the colony was to end. Waugh anticipates Out of Africa by characterizing the settlers “as fellow-victims of the megapolitan culture of Northern Europe” and shows abundant sympathy for the attempt “to recreate Barsetshire on the equator,” to revive a withering English squirearchy by transplanting it to African soil. Blixen’s writing came to echo this elegiac note, but she was more selectively sympathetic toward the settlers, scorned Waugh's style of jingoism and, with it, his almost exhibitionist racism. Clinton St. Quarterly 5 C a n d a c e Bie n e m a n
His prejudices were too fierce and direct for him to take Blixen’s improbable course of enlisting native Kenyans in the battle to keep mercantile values at bay. Compared to most settlers, Blixen treated the Africans on her 4,500-acre plantation with largesse. She protested the heavy taxes exacted from them and the pass system which controlled their movements; she allowed them to cultivate crops in corners of the plantation; and, when the farm was sold, secured a piece of reserve land large enough to ensure that “her” people, some two hundred families, were not hopelessly dispersed. But the problem with Blixen’s relatively benevolent attentions, and with her regard for Africans in general, is that she perceived her relation to them as a species of philanthropic feudalism, with her at the center exercising noblesse oblige and anticipating a deferential loyalty in return. It is this spirit that informs some of her most discomfiting writing. Of Ka- mante Gatura (the youth with the infected leg in the film), she observes: He stuck to the maizecobs of his fathers. Here even his intelligence sometimes failed him, and he came and offered me a Kikuyu delicacy, a roasted sweet potato or a lump of sheep’s fat—as even a civilized dog, that has lived for a long time with people, will place a bone on the floor before you, as a present. .indeed, what is most startling about the entire Out of Africa enterprise— books and film—is the general readiness to take Blixen’s Kenya at face value. Reviewers and commentators have been single-mindedly incurious about imagining how a reverse angle on Kenya, a.few shots from an indigenous perspective, might look. Judith Thurman, for instance, in her eloquent and deeply researched biography, falls under the spell of Blixen’s'feudal habits of mind when she drowsily ventriloquizes her subject’s opinion that [Kenya’s] inhabitants take their places in the hierarchy according to the degree of pride they manifest, with the Africans—mystically forbearing and amused—at the top. The European aristocrats—the , great atavisms like Denys, Berkeley, and the narrator—defer to them, but just slightly and in the same spirit a gentleman feels himself to be morally inferior to a lady. The New York Times was also bewitched. The Travel Section offered a special four-page feature on Kenya to coincide with the film’s release. There was a long piece on game viewing; a guide to restaurants; an essay by Trzebinski, herself a Kenyan settler, on relics from the Blixen era (the old farmhouse, Finch Hatton’s grave, a millstone Blixen once fashioned into a table). And a concluding article, “Kenya through the eyes of writers it inspired,” announced that “when viewed through some of its great memoirists, Kenya reveals its intimate self.” “Inspired,” presumably, was the cue that only white colonial authors were to be expected. Blixen was cited, along with Reviewers and commentators have been single-mindedly incurious about imagining how a reverse angle on Kenya, a few shotsfrom an indigenous perspective, might look. the aviatrix Beryl Markham, and Elspeth Huxley, doyenne of Kenyan racists and author of thirty-five books of bottomless settler jingoism. (Huxley’s novel, The Flame Trees of Thika, was one of imperial nostalgia’s quieter successes in the BBC/PBS version of two or three years back.) None of Kenya’s black authors was to get a word in. The framing of this article to exclude them suggests an impatience with rival perspectives, a sentiment once expressed most candidly by an American reviewer of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God: Perhaps no Nigerian at the present state of his culture and ours can tell us what we need to know about that country, in a way that is available to our under- o Clinton St. Quarterly standing... in the way W.H. Hudson made South America real to us, or T.E. Lawrence brought Arabia to life. All in all, the Times feature succeeded in capturing “the spirit of place,” in a manner deferential to the mood of the film, by a sustained bit of abracadabra that whisked all native Kenyans from sight. B the fata morgana onto which the film’s director and the critics hold most steadfastly is that image of Kenya as paradise or Arcady evoked by some of Blixen’s most transporting prose. Robert Langbaum is surely correct in describing Karen Blixen was obsessed with “brilliant breeding” and the style that went with it, and her unalloyedly aristocratic values provide the key both to her choice in male companionship and to her attitudes to the Africans and the continent itself . Out of Africa as “perhaps the best prose pastoral of our time.” But as the British literary scholar Raymond Williams has underscored, some of the best pastoral commits the most extravagant vanishing acts, the genteel myth of a spontaneously providential Nature hiding from view many hired hands and landless peasants. Certainly the pastoral resonance in Blixen’s writings is no stronger than her faith in Africa as a pure and bountiful beginning, a faith expressed most rapturously in the description of.her maiden flight with Finch Hatton: The language is short of words for the experiences of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names. The image of such a free and original space is hard to resist. Pollack, steeped in Blixen’s prose, recalls moments when, sitting in front of a tent on a Kenyan night in the ‘80s, “you realized this is where it all started. If there was a Garden of Eden, this was it.” And speaking of the immense challenge of hazarding the film, he reflects on how “you have to re-create the paradise to feel the loss.” Others, however, have stayed with the metaphor in order to topple it. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenya’s foremost writer, and one of Africa’s two or three most influential writers, ranks Blixen among the “parasites in paradise.” Ngugi has long quarreled with her vision of Kenya and the undue attention it has received. One can only wonder what he thinks of the film, but in essay after essay in Homecoming, Writers in Politics and Detained, he has inveighed against her as an example of someone who “by setting foot on Kenyan soil at Mombasa was instantly transformed into a blue-blooded aristocrat.” Blixen is certainly, at times, so intoxicated by her quest for a pure Africa, for the unadulterated soul of the continent, that she seems oblivious to her soaring romanticism’s capacity to drag racism in its wake. Ngugi has an eye for such passages, the sort which Thurman’s biography judiciously skirts: When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music. What I learnt from the game of the country was useful to me in my dealings with Africans. And again, The Natives were Africa in flesh and blood. The tall extinct volcano of Longonot that rises above the Rift Valley, the broad Mimosa trees along rivers, the Elephant and the Giraffe, were not more truly Africa than the Natives were.... All were different expressions of one idea, variations upon the same theme. Such passages are doubly disquieting when coupled to recent photographs of Maasais grouped under a sultry Kenyan • sky, as in the Sierra Club's Isak Dinesen’s Africa. _ ^n the hullabaloo surrounding the film, the only glimpse of a Kenyan perspective came in one very brief, very gruff report in People magazine that the Nairobi newspapers had “tried to stir up trouble” by questioning the value of glamorizing Blixen’s Kenya. To gauge why this lionizing (as it were) of the settler days should so rankle with black Kenyans, one has to bring into focus a little of the history that passes hazily beneath both Blixen’s prose and Pollack’s cameras. Rumors of blacks banding together and taking traditional oaths in theforest, along with sporadic attacks on the estates, were sufficient to allow whatever racial hysteria the settlers had held down to burst to the surface. At issue is whether the paradise of the 1910s and ‘20s was the fruit of divine providence or the product of colonial social engineering. As in most pioneer societies, any number of scribblers-cum- adventurers testified that “this place was empty of men, awaiting the coming of white settlers.” One reads of “a howling wilderness that no one wanted,” of European blood, toil, sweat and tears, and finally, of a “flourishing concern.” But the settlers did not stint themselves in insuring that paradise was enlarged. A few years before Blixen disembarked at Mombasa in 1914, the governor of the territory had written home: Your lordship has opened this Protectorate to white immigration and colonization, and I think it well that in confidential correspondence at least, we should face the undoubted issue—viz, that white mates black in a very few moves.... There can be no doubt that the Masai and many other tribes must go under. It is a prospect which I view with equanimity and a clear conscience. Those “very few moves” were as follows. To break the back of the flourishing peasant agriculture, African lands were seized and the inhabitants crammed into reserves. By 1915, a year after Blixen’s arrival, over four and a half million acres of African land had been turned over to about one thousand white farmers in this manner. The purpose was not only to extend the borders of paradise by clearing the land, but to drive Africans into wage labor. By removing the peasants' land with one hand and imposing leaden taxes (Europeans were tax-exempt) and a “pass” system of surveillance with the other, the authorities succeeded in herding the Africans toward the white plantations. And neither Africans nor Asians were permitted to hold land in the White Highlands, the territory’s horn of plenty, while, in a gesture of apocalyptic hubris, whites weregranted 999-year leases from the Crown. Africans also were barred from cultivating the most lucrative crops such as coffee and cotton. f J o r d Delamere, the silver-haired leader of the settlers in the film, was a great champion of these methods and, at the least sign that Africans were becoming self-supporting again, he would urge that their reserve lands be cut back further. Delamere himself came to hoard a million acres. “Possess” would be quite the wrong word, for he was at least as intent on withholding this land from the Africans as he was on keeping it to himself, cultivating only a fraction of it. So much for the colonists’ reasoning that, even if the land had not been empty in the strictest sense, it could be justifiably appropriated because the peasants had not realized its full potential. . In this wdy the Kenyan settlers were blessed with an ample and inexpensive body of labor. By the twenties, they boasted, it was probably the cheapest in the world. And so too the African population, laid waste by famine and disease in congested reserves, dwindled from four million in 1902 to two and a half million in 1921. Ever eager to give their actions a humanitarian veneer, the settlers continued to argue that their arrival had rescued the Africans from the ravages of intertribal warfare. Yet the 47,000 black Kenyans who died after being press- ganged into the Europeans’ First “World” War far outnumbered those killed in generations of intertribal feuding. Blixen was both a beneficiary of these colonial policies and an opponent of some of them. Though not as heartless as most settlers, she did nonetheless gain from the squatter system which, having stripped the Africans of their land, permitted them to leave their allotted reserves and live on the white estates only in exchange for a given quota of labor days per year. By brushing Kenyan history against the colonial grain, so to speak, one may hope to disturb the film’s roseate image of a world pristine in its rugged luxury, in which duress, when it intrudes, is inevitably that of the settlers. And one where, apart from Kamante’s gamy leg and the servants’ sorrow at their mistress’s departure, Blixen is granted a monopoly over pain. A film that so tidily sharpens a tragedy of lost settler love with a tragedy of lost settler land cannot afford to glimpse, far less face, landless suffering which would dwarf and trivialize its central action. It the colonials could spirit away the land issue and busy themselves with their own problems, it was otherwise with the Kenyans. As one of them remarked: When someone steals your ox, it is killed and roasted and eaten. One can forget. When someone steals your land, especially if nearby, one can never forget. It is always there, its trees which were dear friends, its little streams. It is a bitter presence. Doubly so if you are forced to work that land for others. This bitterness came to a head with the Mau Mau revolt from 1952 to 1958, fully twenty years after Blixen had returned to Denmark. It is, more than anything, the events and literature of Mau Mau which explain why Pollack’s celebration of the “glory-days” of settler- dom rankles so badly with Kenyans today. Mau Mau, though it helped clear the
way for independence, was not a nationalist struggle. Quite simply, peasants sought to reclaim the arable land monopolized by white farmers. But rumors of blacks banding together and taking traditional oaths in the forest, along with sporadic attacks on the estates, were sufficient to allow whatever racial hysteria the settlers had held down to burst to the The current interest in a redecorated imperial pastfits snugly with a time when America (selectively defined)feels good about itself andflaunts its right to step abroadfrom a position of unaccommodating strength. surface. Rumors about the most barbarous voodoo rites sent shudders all the way to London, where the Colonial Secretary, in the safety of his office, wrote: “I would suddenly see a shadow fall across the page—the horned shadow of the Devil.” The settlers intuited that paradise was closing down. And their rage was unbridled.- Huxley, Robert Ruark, C.T. Stoneham, C. Wilson, C. Lander, Stuart Cloete, M.M. Kaye, Neil Sheraton. . .a throng of settler writers and settler sympathizers poured out a mixed brew of fiction, “history,” “anthropology,” and “ethnopsychology," that for its venom is almost without equal in the annals of twentieth-century colonialism. In the African make-up there is really no such thing as Iqve, kindness, or gratitude, as we know them, because they have lived all their lives, and their ancestors’ lives, in an atmosphere of terror and violence. There is no proper “love” between man and woman, because the woman is bought for goats and is used as a beast of burden. There is no gratitude, because it would never occur to them to give anything to anybody else, and so they have no way of appreciating kindness or gifts from others. They lie habitually, because to lie is the correct procedure, or else some enemy might find a way to do them damage if they tell the truth. They have no sensitivity about inflicting pain, or receiving pain, because their whole religion is based on blood and torture of animals and each other. These insights from Peter McKenzie, the hero of Ruark’s Something of Value, are a far from eccentric expression of white hysteria. No matter how much Reagan may enjoy bandying phrases like “overt covert aid, ” the day is past when an empire can brazenly announce itself as such. The closest it can come is to don the clothes of a bygone power. When the dust had settled on the six- year revolt, one million peasants had been confined to “fortified villages,” 90,000 sent to detention camps, and there were somewhere over 13,000 dead. Of those killed, 11,500 were alleged Mau Mau members, along with 1,800 Africans accused by Mau Maus of collaborating with the settlers. Yet only sixty-three white soldiers and thirty-two white civilians died. ^6 outcry in the Kenyan press at Pollack’s glossy revival of the proprietary-settler look was partly touched off by the memory of those Mau Mau battles to reclaim the land. But to some Western intellectuals such protests smack, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s phrase, of “historical infantilism.” In an Observer column entitled “Why the Wailing Ought to Stop,” O’Brien vilified those he considers belatedly afflicted by the “the collective self-pity of former subject peoples.” This reprimand was occasioned by the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie’s masterly dismembering of the whole phenomenon of Raj nostalgia. But O’Brien’s point was a more general one. Third Worlders should recognize that colonialism was back then, a different generation’s affair. Finally, let bygones by bygones. To subscribe to O’Brien’s quietism would be to shrug off Colonial nostalgia as an innocent, if sentimental, recollection of things past. But paradoxically, the real focus of nostalgia is never so much then as it is now. The current interest in a redecorated imperial past fits snugly with a time when America (selectively defined) feels good about itself and flaunts its right to step abroad from a position of unaccommodating strength. And, on the opposite shore, it befits the era of a Prime Minister Thatcher bent on browbeating her country into believing that the “sturdier” values of Victorian (and high imperial) times can lead Britain back to greatness. Yet there is a difference between the two. The British empire is in a state of rigor mortis, with the “Falklands spirit” the last twitchings of the corpse. America, on the other hand, after a post-Viet- nam lull, has a revived faith in its military might and in its prerogative to intervene around the globe—in Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Lebanon. But this “imperialism without colonies,” to borrow Harry Magdoff’s phrase, is also an imperialism without a style of its own. No matter how much Reagan may enjoy bandying about phrases like “overt covert aid,” the day is past when an empire can brazenly announce itself as such. The closest it can come is to don the clothes of a bygone power. The popularity of an antique British look to match a new American mood is nowhere more flagrant than in the Banana Republic stores. There is in all this an elegant variant of the new Cold War jingoism, of Rambo, the blue collar hero for whom patriotism means acting before you can doubt. The refined adventurism of Out of Africa and the Banana Republic offers an image that is more delicately imperial. In a rhapsodic review of the film for Time commending Pollack for “the unspeakably gallant act” of matching Blixen’s romantic idealism with a romantic idealism of his own, Richard Schickel unwittingly says it all: Out of Africa is, at last, the free-spirited, fullhearted gesture that everyone has been waiting for the movies to make all decade long. It reclaims the emotional territory that is rightfully theirs. Writer Rob Nixon lives in New York City. This article is reprinted, with permission, from Grand Street, 50 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10024. Artist Jana Rekosh lives in Seattle. It happened last year in Martha’s Vineyard. It happened this year 15 miles from the U.S. Capitol. Tomorrow the censor’s match could burn the freedom to learn in your own backyard. A book in flames may be an extreme example of censorship. But attacks on the freedom to learn happened this year in 46 states. Not just by individuals.. .but by organized groups. There are those who would remove Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men and other great works from our schools and public libraries. This is not .the American way. Which is why PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY exists. We can help protect and preserve your freedom to read, to learn and to decide for yourself. By knowing what your rights are and how you can protect them, you can make sure the freedom to learn never goes up in smoke. People For The I > # ^IQmericanrKiy Don’t take your freedom for granted. People For The American Way, a project of Citizens for Constitutional Concerns, Inc. is a non-partisan citizen's group concerned with rhe individual rights and personal freedoms of all Americans. © People For The American Way PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY . 1424 Sixteenth Street, N.W. I Suite #601A ■Washington, D.C. 20036 □ I want to join you in the battle against I censorship. Here is my tax-deductible gift of . $20 or $ I □ I am interested in reading more about I what is censored in America. Please forward me a copy of your study: | ATTACKS ON THEFREEDOM TO LEARN/ . A 1984-1985 REPORT. | Enclosed is my tax-deductible gift of $35 or I m N o A r M e. E_________ ________________________ | ADDRESS I CITY____ . STATE ZIP I Raise the Banner of Freedom | during Banned Books Week. । September 7-14. PA05 Clinton St. Quarterly 7
8 Clinton St. Quarterly
oyote had spotted Monkey for When Sparrow can’t talk Monkey into walking 10 miles up the beach to Tanah Lot, Coyote accompanies her. Actually, they only make it a mile, to a fancy hotel in Legian. They pretend to be rich tourists and rent a room, in which they romp away good-hearted evasions Sparrow becomes a bird of gaudier plumage, hennaing her hair red. Coyote is twice her age, but kisses her anyhow, when Monkey isn’t looking. Together, the three eat at Kuta’s street stalls, sit on the beach, watch Balinese dances. Coyote is particularly delighted by the story of witch Ragonda. a child-gobbler with sagging breasts and lolling tongue. Coyote and Monkey eat magic mushrooms, at one of the warungs—cheap eating stalls—where ‘‘blue meanies” are served. Coyote and Monkey have strolled two blocks when the psilocybin hits. They collapse in a streetside Hindu-Buddhist shrine, erupting cosmic laughter. Coyote goggles the passing throng, more vibrant and colorful than ever. Turning to say something to Monkey he finds a furry Asian simian, laughing through sharp teeth. Coyote throws back his head and howls, displaying his canines. Hours later the high runs out as the last light drains from a crimson-saffron sunset into the Indian Ocean. tan Australia. Bamboo huts hide among the palms, strollers wear colorful sarongs sculptured gods guard bridges and temples, banana plants and water buffalo are everywhere. The bemo driver parks and leads them down a path to a losman—a cheap lodging house—off in the trees about a mile from Kuta. Coyote rents a small room with two beds, a wardrobe, table and kerosene lamp. Out on the covered porch are chairs and a table for morning bananas and tea. Monkey and Sparrow settle in next door. Coyote listens to Monkey and Sparrow at play, through the woven- frond wall. Sparrow’s passionate chirps excite him. Coyote had spotted Monkey for the shaman-joker of Asia right off. Monkey has come out to meet the trickster-hero from North America. “Funny, you don’t look Chinese,’’ Coyote jokes. “No more than you look Chinook,” laughs Monkey. Coyote teases Sparrow mercilessly, breaking down her English reserve. He tickles her despite her girlish giggles and trickster-hero from North America. "Funny, you don't look Chinese," Coyote jokes. "No more than you look Chinook/ laughs Monkey. rom the dank tropical edge of the arid Australian dreamscape, a single jetplane arrows eastward once each Thursday to Bali, isle of heavenly delights. American Coyote, Golden Darwin, its palm-lined square clotted with spaced-out dirtbaggers, its scorched-earth suburbs deadly with lank philistines. Coyote trots aboard, Sparrow flutters in, Monkey swings up on his invisible sky-rope. They disembark in Bali to the clamor, jostle and reek of Indonesia, the spice scents and babble of countless dapper guides. Blond-maned Monkey, all shoulders and calves, hails a bemo, the long-bed pickup truck with roof and benches down the side that is the local cheap transport. He orders the driver to speed them to Kuta, where the shirtsleeve cosmopolites are kicking- back cheap this year. Skinny grey Coyote eyes English Sparrow, a slim pink morsel with fine high breasts, sombre in greys and browns. Monkey and Sparrow have been hitchhiking around Australia together. Coyote recalls his fondness for nibbling small birds. Green-gold Bali is splendid after greyClinton St. Quarterly 9
collapsed JL hose miserable prudes the Javanese made the Balinese women cover their breasts decades the afternoon. Sparrow later tells Monkey that Coyote is wealthier than he lets on, neglecting to mention how she knows. Bali shimmers in the heat, awaiting monsoon rains. The rice paddies shrivel yellow. A farmer carries green forage to his buffalo, tethered to a palm. One day when Monkey returns from the beach he finds Sparrow’s pack gone. He questions broad, bovine Water Buffalo, who runs the losman, and learns that Coyote has lugged English Sparrow’s backpack away, Sparrow flitting at his side. “Foreign people come, foreign people go,” Water Buffalo comments disapprovingly. “Prolly go ‘nothah losman.” ■are, the sere ong-delayed inward. In the cinder cones poke jaggedly up, and on their flank a new crater smokes ominously. The lake is five miles tong and two wide, but looks no more than a crescent-shaped mud-puddle at one edge of the vast pit. Coyote and Monkey hike down into the depths, under a burning sun. As they descend the world turns grey, charcoal and black, under an indigo sky. There is ago. Only girls before puberty and old women with withered dugs are occasionally seen uncovered. This girl refuses to admit she is pubescent, though her breasts are ripe pears. paddies are bro earth thirsting monsoon^ Only 2,000-foi Monkey is thoroughly annoyed by this perfidy. When next he sees Coyote, he raves long and loud. “Don’t be silly, Monkey,” Coyote replies, “Sparrow is a bird of passage; you could never have 'hoped to keep her.” _M iita is small. They keep meeting. Encountered atone, Coyote almost apologizes. “English Sparrow begged me to carry her away,” he tells Monkey. “I’d never set out to pinch a fellow traveler’s baggage. But you have to admit that only a fool would turn down such a well-feathered creature. Didn’t you yourself pry Sparrow loose from a Kiwi in Adelaide?” Monkey visits them at their new losman, closer to the sea. Lusa Losman is a traditional compound of bamboo and banana fronds, 14 rooms around a courtyard exploding with scent-rich blossoms. Monkey takes a room. He waves to the lovers from his morning bananas and tea. Sparrow is painting her toenails crimson to match her new scarlet sarong. The happy couple go off to Ubud, the artists’ town, intending to continue to Mt. Agung, a vast volcano the Balinese claim is the navel of the world. Several days later Coyote returns atone. As Coyote tells it, they argued about nothing at all, and Sparrow disappeared with doltish Ox, who’d been mooing his devotion through the alleys and galleries of Ubud. When Coyote returns to Lusa Losman all the rooms are taken. He persuades Monkey to let him use the other bed in his room. At night they hear melodious wooden cow bells. The gekko calls “gekko, gekko, gekko." In the distance, dogs bark. Monkey and Coyote cautiously become friends again. They decide to go back up to Ubud, to buy art and view volcanoes and continue on to the north coast. But before they depart, Monkey turns haggard and sweaty. They have seen other travelers sicken. It is dengue fever, also called breakbone. The victim squirms and sweats, too weak to move, too pained to lie still. After five days the attack passes. Travelers who consult a doctor are given aspirin and sent to rest in bed. Pain wracked and gushing sweat, Monkey sits up wide-eyed and begs Coyote not to leave him. “ I know you want to get to the mountains,” he groans, “but stay with me until I get on my feet again. Don’t leave me atone here.” Eight thousand miles from home, and still feeling vaguely guilty, how could Coyote leave? He brings Monkey pitchers of water and changes the sopping towels, fetches soda-pop from the nearby warung, finds aspirin, and walks clear into Kuta seeking milk. Monkey babbles and writhes in fever dreams. Coyote mops his brow. Coyote preaches himself a sermon about doing good without expecting a reward. He forgets his trickster ways and plays the hero full time. After five days Monkey sits up from damp twisted sheets, smiles wanly. He takes a cool shower. Later that day he toddles to the warung for orange soda and a grilled cheese sandwich. Soon he is well enough to travel and they zoom up to Ubud. There they meet English Sparrow on the street, wearing a stunning new purple dress barely held up by spaghetti straps, her toenails sparkling gold. Sparrow walks beside a tall, dark-haired Frog, practicing her French. Coyote rolls his eyes and licks his chops theatrically. “I’d take you back anytime,” he tells her. “I’m having a lovely time flitting about,” Sparrow replies. Ljynte and Monkey head toward Mt. Batur, a huge crater lake up- country. They climb toward Penelokan, high on the rim of the volcano. The rice only a little scrub vegetation and the heat reflects in shimmering waves from the encircling walls. Coyote and Monkey begin to argue. How fast should they go and which direction; should they take a canoe or a motorboat? Visiting an aboriginal village on the lake, Monkey disappears for an hour, while Coyote frets. When Monkey returns he borrows dollars from Coyote for a mysterious deal. The natives stare at Coyote. Their dead ancestors rot in bamboo cages at the nearby cemetery. Monkey returns, laughing and scratching. He claims he will share his good trade on money with Coyote. “Why are you sulking, Coyote?” he wants to know. After bitter argument they finally direct the canoeman across the hammered- pewter lake to Toyabungkah village. Girls come to the school there to learn the Legong Dance, most graceful and feminine of the Balinese dances, performed exclusively by young girls. From up the hill Coyote and Monkey hear gamelan music. But they are hot and tired, and there is a hotspring pool at the edge of the lake. They will bathe first. As they recline in steaming water, a bare-breasted girl comes down. Those miserable prudes the Javanese made the Balinese women cover their breasts decades ago. Only THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD 50 Years Fighting for Social Justice National lawyers Guild • 853 Broadway, Room 1705 New York, NY 10003 • 212-260-1360 James Canfield Artistic Director Available for Touring PACIFIC BALLET THEATRE (503) 235-2229 1119 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97205 10 Clinton St. Quarterly
t dawn, Coyote is sweating mightily. He feels lousy. “I’ve got dengue fever,” he tells Monkey, who lays his hand on Coyote’s forehead. “ Naw,” Monkey regirls before puberty and old women with withered dugs are occasionally seen uncovered, not counting the foreign girls on Kuta beach. This girl refuses to admit she is pubescent, though her breasts are ripe pears. Monkey views her coolly; Coyote becomes feverishly agitated. She is for an instant a naked brown sprite as her red- orange sarong floats free and she slips into the water. Coyote clears his throat loudly and sidles resolutely toward her. The girl casts apprehensive looks, but Coyote refuses to notice. He tries to start a conversation with his 12 words of Indonesian. Monkey whispers a warning, but Coyote is beyond reason. He floats closer, until the child covers herself and flees. Monkey snarls. Coyote growls. They sit a long time, sweating in hot water. “Well,” Coyote defends himself, “she needed to learn that she has to watch out for men like me.” Renting a room Monkey is dismayed to discover that the wad of Indonesian money he’s bought is mostly cut-up newspaper. This doesn’t improve their dispositions a bit. They go up to the school in the center of the village. Craning their necks around a partly open door, they watch girls practice the dance. Later, eating dinner, Coyote chats with Binturong, the foxfaced matron who runs their losman. Bin- turong’s daughter Martin flits past, a shapely bird, exquisitely-proportioned. All these beautiful girls are driving Coyote wild. Monkey goes off to bed. In the morning he will climb the taller of the cinder cones that jut above the town. Coyote declines this useless exertion under the tropical sun. He has been hanging around with Monkey too much. Two men together can be a bore. assures him, “nothing to speak of. Probably just Binturong’s cooking.” Monkey will return after his climb, and they will “get out of this hole.” By evening Coyote is flat on his back. Dengue is a fire in the marrow of his bones and boiling lead in his joints. Sweat runs from every pore and there is no comfortable way to lie. Breakbone is steady, unrelenting pain. Monkey has carried off the aspirin. Nor does Monkey return at nightfall. Coyote writhes and sleeps, groans and dozes. Staggering to the toilet next morning, Coyote finds himself in a grey emptiness under a burning cobalt sky. Coyote memorizes the cracks in the ceiling. He is alone on the floor of a volcano and the hours pass slowly. He reflects on his errors. He dreams of naked little girls with tiny breasts that swell, then sag into the witch Ragonda’s pendulous boobs. He hears Monkey’s raucous laughter, and sees pillars of smoke and strange deities in forms of fantasy and horror. When will Monkey return? He dreams monsters. The earth swallows him, blood red lava flows. The vast pit is carmine. Mt. Batur is the vulva of the world and Coyote is trapped inside. He realizes that Monkey will never return, and he will never get out. This is Earth’s punishment for his lifelong lasciviousness; for lubricity, lust and or- ality. For peeking through knotholes, for treating women as objects, for masturbation, fornication, seduction, and salacious fascination. The world’s womb has swallowed him, and will cook his meat forever. The third day thunderheads tower high above. In lucid moments Coyote chuckles that Monkey hasn’t returned. Who would have guessed that the very person he nursed would abandon him? He hopes the bastard fell into the crater. All Coyote has had is trouble since he met that blond-haired devil. Coyote wonders if this is really dengue, or some other, deadlier fever. There is no respite from pain. ' J_ his is Earth's punishment for his lifelong lasciviousness; for lubricity lust and orality; for masturbation, fornication, seduction, and salacious fascination. The world's womb has swallowed him, and will cook his meat forever. In dreams the cinder cones are Earth’s clitoris, and Monkey rubs himself against it. Steam and smoke pour from the active crater, Monkey dives in. Barely nubile Balinese dancers surround Coyote. They bare their tiny slim bodies, stroke their own breasts and smile enticingly. Monkey comes up through the floor laughing and capering, he handles and caresses the girls, waves his cock, waves Coyote’s cock. Coyote sits up to make him stop but finds his own hand there, and himself alone in a dusty-white room, clothes and gear slung all across the floor and beds. He staggers to the stinking squat toilet, but nothing comes. Low dark clouds obscure the sky. Thunder roars above the mountains. He laughs at Monkey’s treachery. It is a good lesson which he will never forget. If he lives. The volcano erupts. This must be the end. The great blown-out, burning cunt of the world is giving birth. Her water breaks! He hears it roar on the roof. Water gurgles and splashes everywhere. He rises and staggering weakly to the door, he looks out. Water pours down the slope into the lake, rain pounds the roof, huge drops dapple the ground, water is everywhere. The monsoon has reached Bali at last. Coyote realizes he no longer hurts. ■ ■ ■ J L he fever departs as swiftly as it came. When he goes to pay the bill he finds that without what Monkey borrowed he hasn’t enough. He trades Binturong the gear Monkey left plus his own black folding umbrella. A day later, safe in decadent Kuta, a room is vacant at Lusa Losman. He can rest at last. English Sparrow is staying at Lusa Losman with Sandpiper, a tall, lisping chap. She says they are “just like sisters.” Sparrow has cut and spiked her hair now and and wears three earrings in each lobe. She proposes that she, Sandpiper and Coyote become a trio; Coyote in the middle. She seems genuinely surprised when he refuses. Something burned away in the fiery pit. English Sparrow seems dangerously flighty to entrust with so fragile a part of his body. Coyote sees Monkey one more time. At the post office Coyote is surprised to hear that familiar maniacal laugh, and turns to see Monkey approaching, his mouth full of teeth. Monkey greets him cordially, as a long lost friend. “I had dengue,” Coyote reproaches him. “Why the hell didn’t you come back?” “Oh, it was too hot in there. I couldn’t stand it any longer. You say you had dengue, but it was probably just the heat of all those girls around you, Coyote. Did you bring my gear out?” “Damn your gear,” Coyote shouts. “You lost my money and abandoned me when I was sick, you bastard.” “Ha, ha, Coyote, you’re getting old and crotchety,” Monkey says.”l didn’t take your money, I got gypped out of money tnyself. I was curing you all right, but the disease was chasing little birds. Ha, ha, ha.” “You damn primate!” Coyote rages, but Monkey dances off, past Balinese in business suits and travelers in drawstring trousers, airline captains, Iowa dentists, brown boys in tailored shirts and old women in black. Monkey turns and laughs, all teeth and testicles, then vaults by his invisible skyrope up toward the ceiling, his tail flapping out behind. He disappears entirely, in the general direction of Asia. Rick Rubin lives in Portland and writes for numerous national, regional and neighborhood publications. His last story for CSQ was on Portland Mayor Bud Clark. Artist Tim Braun lives in Portland. He regularly illustrates and designs for CSQ. 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