From: kamorgan@athena.mit.edu (Keith Morgan)
Subject: Re: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 01:57:01 GMT

Crawford Kilian writes:

					>I have a very hard time with the very
>concept of cultural appropriation. In effect, it tells writers they can write
>only about themselves; they have neither the right nor even the ability to
>explore anyone else's culture, or to show their own in the light of someone
>else's.

>In its most extreme form, which I call "clonism," the premise is that nobody
>knows the trouble I've seen except someone just like me--and nobody except
>someone just like me has any business writing about my experience and values.
>The logical extension of this view is that artistic expression is beside the
>point--no one except someone just like you can ever *really* understand the
>experience you portray in art. And if art can't communicate across cultures,
>generations and genders, what the hell is the point?

Crawford makes a very perceptive point, a point that I think is
similar to that of Derek Walcott in his Nobel Lecture. Walcott begins
with a story of how he came upon a dramatization of the *Ramayana* in
the small Trinidadian village of Felicity, later in the lecture he
says:

	Deprived of their original language, the captured and
indentured tribes created their own, accreting and secreting fragments
of an old, epic vocabulary from Asia and from Africa, but to an
ancestral and ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by
slavery or indenture, while nouns are replaced and the given names of
places accepted like Felicity or Choiseul . . . . This is the basis of
the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes,
these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered
customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle
passage and the *Fatel Rozack*, the ship that carried the first
indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of
Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the
Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling
cloth samples on his bicycle.

	And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of
Spain, the sum of history, Froude's "non-people." A downtown babel of
shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a
history, like heaven. Because this is what such a city is, in the New
World, a writer's heaven.

Walcott describes both the strengths and weakness of cultural
appropriation in the lecture but in the final analysis he seems more
enthusiastic of the final product than those who bemoan this cultural
mixing. Walcott's vision seems, at least to me, that of the positive
non-institutional multi-cultural experience. Here, in one last
excerpt, is some proof of that vision. Walcott speaks of his fellow
Antillean, fellow poet, and fellow Nobel laureate St.-John Perse:

	To celebrate Perse, we might be told, is to celebrate the old
plantation system, to celebrate the *bequ/e*, or plantation rider,
verandas and mulatto servants, a white French language in a white pith
helmet, to celebrate a rhetoric of patronage and hauteur; [Walcott
continues] The fragrent and privileged poetry that Perse composed to
celebrate his white childhood and the recorded Indian music behind the
brown young archers of Felicity . . . pierce me equally. . . . in
*Anabase*, Perse assembled fragments of an imaginary epic, with the
clicking teeth of frontier gates, barren wadis with the froth of
poisonous lakes, horseman burnoosed in sandstorms, the opposite of
cool Caribbean mornings, yet not necessarily a contrast anymore than
some young brown archer at Felicity, hearing the sacred text blared
across the flagged field, with its battles and elephants and
monkey-gods, is a contrast to the white child in Guadeloupe assembling
fragments of bamboo leaves from the ancient languages, Hindi, Chinese,
and Arabic, on the Antillean sky. From the *Ramayana* to Anabasis,
from Guadeloupe to Trinidad, all that archaeology of fragments lying
around, from the broken African kingdoms, from the crevasses of
Canton, from Syria to Lebanon, vibrating not under the streets but in
our raucous, demotic streets.

			[end of quote]

I know that the original query was about spiritual appropriations but
I think Walcott is right on target. Notice that in the end of the
first quoted passage that he views this conglomeration of cultures as
a "heaven", indeed, a "writer's heaven." This surely turns the tables
on the idea of cultural appropriations as something to mourn. I think
that Walcott shows that cultures can mix and strengthen each other,
especially if such cultures are fortunate enough to be removed from
the bombastic priorities of technological modernity.

Finally, Crawford mentions the situation in Canada. I remember when
Bill Kinsella was being severely criticized for his portrayal of
natives in the *Fencepost Chronicles*. This criticism came from both
white and native quarters but what always struck me was that people
who were so offended by Kinsella writing in the "voice" of the natives
surely had never *read* the books. It seemed clear to me that
Kinsella's natives, although perceived through the lens of white
culture as suspicious and shiftless were *always* smarter and quicker
and more admirable than the whites in the books.

Keith




--

Keith Morgan kamorgan@athena.mit.edu
In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was
preposterous and true and totally unacceptable. Edward Whittemore
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