Volume 48
JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2008
48. 7: Devil's Island(s) 2.28.2008
Prisoner cell block
I remember the very first full-length book I read. I might have been seven
r eight years old and I was abed with a fever when I read Smilin’ Jack
Escapes from Devil’s Island. I still remember his description of building
a glider and departure from a cliff top, maybe the same one that Papillion
escaped from.) That fever must have stoked my imagination. I was hooked on
books from the day I turned the last page of that book and regretted that
it was over.
I thought of Smilin’ Jack as I trudged up the slope of the real Devil’s
Island, a place I never thought I would visit when I was a kid. The first thing
learned was that Devil’s Island is really three islands, Les Iles du
Salut, that are clustered twelve miles off the coast of French Guyana and that
different features of the prison system that was maintained by the French from
1851 to 1953, were spread over all three of them. My visit was only to the
main island, L’Ile Royale, where most of the thousand nor so prisoners
were kept and most of the ancillary structures, such as the hospital, chapel,
warders quarters and morgue, in addition to the main cellblock, still remain.
My second book about the Island was Papillon, the story of and by Henri Charrière,
who escaped from there around 1948, seventeen years after being sent there.
It was made into a movie in 1973 starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
At the summit of the island I see there is perhaps a place from where Jack
and Papillon (for the butterfly tattoo n his chest) might have made their daring
departures. But then, the solitary confinement block is over on the Ile St.
Joseph. In the movie there is quite a high cliff, which there indeed might
be over on the Ile Sr. Joseph, where the solitary confinement cells are. One
can see why very few men escaped from Devil’s Island; the nearest land
was a twelve-mile shark gauntlet away.
Also, very few were ever repatriated to France. But one f those was the renowned
Captain Alfred Dreyfus. L’affaire Dreyfus was he subject of the second
book I read hat involved Devil’s Island. France was nearly sundered by
the framing of Captain Dreyfus for treason, and the anti-Semitism was that
also a divisive element of his case. Dreyfus ended up doing four years in Devil’s
Island (literally, in his case, because he was kept under close guard in a
separate house on the one island that is named L’Ile du Diable. After
he was exonerated with the help of the likes of Emile Zola (his famous 1898
letter on the front page of the Paris daily, L’Aurore, titled in huge
print, “J’Accuse!” in which he accuses the French government
of anti-Semitism and falsely incarcerating Dreyfus), Dreyfus was one of the
few to make it off Devil’s Island and be repatriated.
Dreyfus was fortunate. He was, at times, required to sleep in irons for a time,
but otherwise was reasonably comfortable in a hut that was four meters by four
meters. The cells for other prisoners, most of which were in a cell block that
still exists, were less commodious, and were caged at the top so that they
could be under constant surveillance. The worst incarceration was a smaller
cellblock that held those who were scheduled for execution. Yet, the colony
contained its more humane elements, a hospital (and lunatic asylum), a chapel,
and even a swimming area composed of a sectioned-off area of beach. There
are also a couple of cemeteries, but these seem to have been reserved for the
staff. Convicts were wrapped in a shroud, placed in a coffin weighed with a
few stones and dropped from a boat into the sea.
Today, the colony strikes one as a place gradually going to ruin, with some
buildings improved and retained for the tourist trade. Only the cells convey
a sense of the suffering that the inmates might have undergone, particularly
if they were transported to this place for crimes that today would result in
a slap on the wrist, like that for which Victor Hugo wrote that Jean Valjean
was convicted for committing. French indictees were required to prove their
innocence, rather than vice versa. Still, there were probably proportionally
far fewer Frenchmen and women in prison than the one in one-hundred in America
today. There is a leavening of Devil’s Island today as the tropical island
flora and fauna gradually reassert their hegemony over the three islands. Agoutis,
lizards, iguanas and peacocks scurry and wander among the crumbling buildings
and coconuts can be seen sprouting new palms. Devil’s Island looks almost
like the type of place some oil sheik would buy and turn into some private
pleasure domain; but then, superstition, and the ghosts of the past, the desperate
screams in the humid tropical nights or the threat of malaria, and yellow and
dengue fevers might keep them at bay.
My fever wasn’t malarial, yellow, or dengue when a sweated and shivered
and turned the pages of Smilin’ Jack Escapes from Desert Island. But
it cooked my young imagination and gave me a thirst for more adventures from
books, and left me with the desire to see then places that inspired them. And,
thanks to Smilin’ Jack, I smiled to myself, knowing that I was probably
the only one on Devil’s Island that day who knew how to build a glider
and make my escape.
_______________________________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp
48. 6: BITCH! A TRAVEL NARRATIVE 2.23.2008
© 2008,
UrbisMedia
Bitch! That’s what I
mumbled under my breath, straining not to let it out in an anger relieving
shout. But I knew better; I was in a strange foreign airport, and this bitch
could give me even more trouble than she was giving me now.
OK, a slight sidebar here. I know I’m not supposed to call women bitches
and, in fact, I make no habit of it. I’m no hip-hop rapper; I won’t
even call a “ho” a “bitch.” But this woman deserved
the appellation as much as Leona Helmsley. I’ll take my chances on admonitory
emails; I’m going to use it.
She took my nail clippers! Now I have surrendered countless nail
clippers to security people at airports all over the world. Why? Because,
I forget to put them in checked luggage. But also because security people
believe that they can be used to clip the nails of an airline pilot down
to the quick and then can be forced to fly into buildings. They used to take
my tiny beard-grooming scissors, too, because they can be used to circumcise
pilots. But this is about clippers, which have a little “blade” attached
(for cleaning under the nails) which might be wielded like a saber by a terrorist.
The bitch kept repeating “cleeps,” and getting more pissed off at
me until I understood what she meant and brought forth from my carry-on a nail
clipper that I had bought in Hong Kong that has no offending “blade.” I
explained that it had none and demonstrated it, but she kept saying “no
cleeps.” She had that affect-less non-expression, that un-modulated, recorded,
voice that they teach at the best torture academies. I said the clippers have
been through a dozen airports without question. “No cleeps.” Bitch! I
mumbled again (OK, I put an F-word participle in front of it this time.) It
was almost audible this time. But I held back. This was an airport in Manaus,
Brazil, well up the Amazon River and no place I wanted to experience the local
interrogation techniques that combine pirañhas with standard CIA waterboarding.
I loved those “cleeps.” (see, now she has me doing it). They had
such a clever design, folding flat into an orange plastic case from which they
popped up to do their excellent “cleeping” when you squeezed the
release button. They were cool “cleeps,” and now that Bitch has
them! I hope she cuts her cuticle and bleeds to death!
I know, you’re saying they were just a pair of “cleeps” (see,
now you’re doing it), and I seem to be over-reacting. But these were special
clippers. And then there’s the principle of the thing. These were innocent
clippers; as innocent as I am. And I was . . . violated! This was worse than
when they pulled my pants down at the Sydney airport, in front of everybody,
and not a single woman offered me her email address. (See DCJ Archives 36. 8, “Traveling
As American,” for more details). Violated! I come from a country where
. . . where . . . oh, never mind. She appropriated my “cleeps” and
waved me on like some inept wannabe terrorist. Bitch!
I sat glumly in the boarding lounge, drinking from the can of Coke that the
Bitch had totally missed in my carry-on. Stupid Bitch! But, as calmed myself,
I began to feel some hope of redemption and revenge—Julio.
If they didn’t discover Julio in my checked luggage I would feel better
about the “cleeps” incident. Not that Julio was some “illegal” trying
to get smuggled into America to pick our fruit and drive us nuts with leaf blowers.
My Julio is, after all, a pirañha, one of those vicious little blade-toothed
wolves of the waters of the Amazon that, along with a legion of their colleagues,
have a reputation for being able to pick a cow clean in a matter minutes when
they are in a feeding frenzy.
Since the days of my childhood, when I was dispatched by my mother to buy some
Italian cold cuts or Parmesan cheese from Mr. Dispenza’s grocery, I would
stop at the pet store nearby to visit the pirañha. There, in a small aquarium
in the pet store window, was a single fearsome little devil with his serrated,
prognathus jaw. It was as motionless, as if pasted on the aquarium glass, its
eye staring menacingly at me—until the pet store owner dropped a small
chunk of meat into the water. In the blink of an eye it snatched and gulped
the meat, and my toes would curl up in my PF Keds sneakers.
Julio won’t be doing any such thing. He’s dead. I purchased his
desiccated and lacquered body from a woman vendor in Santarem, Brazil. He is
a bit larger than my hand, and his teeth are all there in that gaping maw,
and his eyes still have that stare. The thought of him and thousands of his
friends answering the dinner bell as I am taking a dip along the bank of the
Amazon chills my blood.
It’s against the importation rules to bring Julio into the U.S. He is,
even dead, in that category of proscribed foreign products that might harbor
pests, vermin and other threats to American agriculture (maybe killer bees snuck
in inside dead piranhas). I don’t think he can do much harm in a permanent
lacquered state of rigor mortis on a shelf in my condo. He made it over the
border in a box I sandwiched between two books against the checked luggage
x-ray and now quietly resides in my little museum of travel curiosities, a
ghostly reminder that I finally made it to the Amazon.
It had been fifteen years since I first tried to travel up the great river
but, ironically, the malaria medicine that I took back then made me too sick
to go. This time I passed on the malaria meds and took my chances with a spray
can of DEET. It is a magnificent river, as broad at its mouth as the distance
between London and Paris, a great café au lait fluvium making a beige fan on the
Atlantic. It flows more serenely than the roiling Yangtse and carries a procession
logs and small islands of tropical forest debris. Where the Rio Negro intersects
there is a clear delineation of black and brown water. This used to be little
Julio’s “acquarium.” I justify my law-breaking with the
rationalization that, eventually, Julio would have been eaten by a larger fish,
or even by one of his buddies. Now he has the noble job of being an aide-memoire
for my long-delayed trip to the Amazon.
Julio also helps me fantasize that it would be great if that Brazilian security
Bitch happened to fall into some Amazon waters where Julio’s ex-colleagues
were coming off a two-week fast. Pirañhas! Now were talking real “cleepers,” Bitch!
____________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp
48. 5: WHERE’S BOB? 2.21.2008
I got a phone call the other day from a guy who knew my friend Bob. I hadn’t seen Bob for decades. He was a former professor of mine when I was an undergraduate, who had moved to the Midwest to teach at his alma mater, a Catholic university. Bob was very Catholic.
The distance, in time, and geography, was probably good for our friendship. Bob was also very conservative, not just in his Catholicism. Let’s put it this way: he was a Bushie and a Clinton-hater. Politics and metaphysics had put quite a strain on our association in recent years and our communication became infrequent.
Bob’s friend had phoned me because he had found my last letter to Bob (who would have nothing to do with email) among Bob’s “effects.” Bob had a stroke and after a couple days in te hospital, he died. So I expect that he received Extreme Unction (last rites) since Bob was no piker when it came to dropping green into the collection basket at mass. He had paid for the full Catholic send-off.
From his friend I learned that Bob was already dead at the time I was writing that last letter. In the letter I was jabbing away at his political conservatism, expecting that he would respond, fulminating in paragraphs of dense pica text in a return letter, typed on an ancient IBM Selectric (Bob had no use for a computer).
Bob was an Italian-American from Philadelphia. His ideal of haute cuisine was a Philly cheesesteak sandwich (hence the stroke?). He had been an electrician in the Navy, after which he took degrees in sociology, concluding with a Ph.D. thesis that argued against the liberal use of annulments in the Catholic church to dissolve marriages. After securing a post at a well-know Catholic university in the Midwest, Bob met an ex-nun. They were married and had, I believe, three children. Twelve years later Bob came home one day to find his wife and children gone, along with then contents of his bank account. She moved to a state further west, divorced Bob, who wrote with much bitterness that he was wiped out by the settlement and she poisoned the kids against him. He said that she must be on a twelve-year cycle, since she had been a nun for twelve years before quitting the convent. Bob, never recovered from the experience. Ironically, he could not remarry since he was a on record as supporting the church’s position on divorce. Only golf, a game he loved, it seemed, gave him any please or respite from sinking further into his bitter conservatism.
When I think about Bob now I think about him from an eschatological point of view. Put another way, I wonder where IS Bob?
I think that there are three (maybe more) possible places where Bob might be.
Bob is in heaven. He is in just the sort of heaven that he and I, and all Roman Catholics and other Christians, have been given to believe exists and where we will go if we die in a “state of grace.” Bob probably received Extreme Unction, which would have cleansed his soul of any mortal sins (these are the sins that will send you straight to Hell ), and therefore Bob is probably in Heaven (Yea, way to go, Bob!).
Oblivion. But then again, Bob might be nowhere, because maybe there is no “other side.” Nobody has ever seen heaven, or Valhalla, or the Elysian Fields, of Nirvana, or the Happy Hunting Grounds, or even that place with rivers of wine and seventy-two virgins for every guy who blows himself to bits. There might be no afterlife, only non-existence. So there used to be Bob, but now there is non-Bob, a Bob-less void where Bob used to exist. There is only the “remains” the “dust unto dust” part of Bob, corrupting in the earth, but no Bob elsewhere, because elsewhere doesn’t exist. This is a tough conclusion to comprehend—that existence is like a switch; for a while you are switched “on,” then you are “off.” Maybe the physical Bob is just recycled into some other arrangement of carbon atoms and Bob just becomes “building material” for something else. There was a time before we existed, so why not a time after our existence.
Another dimension. But maybe there is someplace that Bob, or some aspect, or manifestation of Bob, is now; some place beyond our comprehension, imagination, or that our science has yet to reveal to us (notice I did not say “scripture” has not revealed). This dimension might be different than the nexus of Time and Space that we have some familiarity with. So maybe Bob—at least what a non-materialist would call the “spirit,” or the “soul,” or what I would call consciousness, or self-awareness, of Bob has just passed into, or through, some great black hole into a new dimension of space-time.
I find such a possibility much more plausible than the fairy tale afterlife of religious imagination with God, his Son, and Mary sitting on some cloud, where all of the faithful observers of religious dogma assemble at some grand, eternal, boring, picnic (or, the rejected roasting in the eternal Hell fires with people they didn’t expect to meet there).
We have only been wondering about “the other side” for about 100,000 years or so—a nano blink in the great span of time since the big bang. It is to be expected that we do not care for existence to end with only the few years given to us. It seems reasonable (a distinctly human attribute), even to the agnostic, to posit that there is no purpose to existence, although one must wonder if that purpose is to attain some sort of celestial retirement, whether it be a picnic with the holy family, or a frolic with seventy-two virgins. What is to happen to all human achievement, both individually and socially? Is it all for no purpose beyond this lifetime? These are reasonable questions, but why has human imagination come up with such silly and fanciful objectives? But if it seems a waste of the achievements of the human experience just to chuck it into oblivion, what a waste it seems for nit to have been nothing but a contest in which one wins an eternity of just pleasure or pain. That it has all been some silly game of choosing the right religion and following, or not following, its dogma to the grand prize of eternal salvation or damnation.
We, of course, have had the hubris to place ourselves, mankind, as the central purpose of creation. We think we are the reason some creator (in whose image we are created) came up with then idea of the universe, to relieve his loneliness, so that he would come to have a “holy family” that we would join at some celestial picnic on a cloud. All the rest of Nature, of the vast universe—why was it necessary to create such a vast entity as the universe, and why was it necessary to take such time and the process of evolution?—was that all just matrix for the human race and its dreams of a heavenly afterlife? Nature is not wasteful, why should it waste cockroaches and whole galaxies?
So maybe we should consider that we are not the end purpose of existence, that we are part of a process that is longer than our lives and imaginations. Perhaps you might think that such musings simply substitute science fiction for metaphysics.
What’s
the matter with Jim? Perhaps the question should be what matter is Jim? And
now, what matter is Bob?
________________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp
48. 4: WHITHER REPUBLICANS? 1.26.2008
UrbisMedia
As I write, this George W. Bush is probably checking over his last (thank you, Lord!) State of the Union address, to a union, the state of which, thanks to George W. Bush, mirrors the failure and mess that is the rest of the life of George W. Bush. His name is not even invoked by Republicans running to replace him and he is not asked for endorsements or to join the contestants on the hustings. As he is for the nation he is for them, this kiss of death, George will imply that he was a “decider” who had to make tough, unpopular decisions for his country (yeah, like big tax cuts for the rich, torturing detainees, and spying on his own people), but that history will exonerate and enshrine him in the halls of apotheosized Republican scumbags alongside the venerable St. Ronnie the Gypper.
The one good thing that George W. Bush might have done is fracture the coalition of fats cats, racists, evangelicals and less odious Republicans that gave him enough votes for Scalia to make him president. In that bunch of dolts lined up at the Republican candidate debates is an unwieldy rainbow of contemporary Republicanism, from Giuliani to Paul, and hardly a one of them really favored by the party kingmakers.
These days Republicans are trying to find out who, or what they are. There is a long distance from Abe Lincoln to Ike, and a like distance from Ike to George W. Bush. They are not agreement on the likes of Mike Huckabee, or John McCain, who respective populism, or renegade status, are neither GWB, or their dear apotheosizes, and dead, Ronnie.
There are at least four major groupings of Republicans: basic, working-class (W/Cs), Suburban middle class; evangelical-Christian, and Country-club. There are shades of difference within these, and regional differences as well. But when they keep it together, they are usually in power.
It has always amazed me that those working-class Republicans get sucked in to the “we are the party looking out for the mall guy getting screwed (taxed) by big government (read Democrats). I can sort of understand it on issues related to national defense. The Republicans have been successful in convincing the w/c Republicans that Vietnam was a war that would stem the advance of Communism in countries most of them couldn’t find on a map, that it wasn’t a civil war, and that we lost. 911 made it easy to convince that Iraq (or Islam) was our enemy and that it was all right to invade and start a civil war. They don’t get it that it will be their sons and daughter mostly who will have to fight, dies or returned maimed in these ill-considered wars. But then they buy into the military thing. Once the Republican biggies get the W/C kids into uniform, they have got the whole family. Then it doesn’t matter if the screw these people over by cutting programs or funding for programs that would benefit them, shift enormous chunks of national wealth to the top one percent, but I can understand that they are so dumb they don’t mind. They seem to go like sheep to the slaughter when, for a recent example, the Republicans deregulate the securities and baking system such that they prey unsuspecting people with sub prim mortgages. Millions are losing their homes, but mainly because the fat-cat Republicans are concerned about the stock market, they W/Cs will $800 bucks in compensations. How can they not get that? Panem et circenses has worked with these sorts of people since Roman times.
Though there are some overlaps with the W/Cs, the Suburban Republicans may share social values with some of the W/Cs but they are less concerned about their jobs being exported, since more of them are in the service sector than the manufacturing sector. They want security, or to move up the income ladder and they see Republican economic values—particularly no new taxes—enhancing their disposable income. Their kids will go to college and not the military. What drives them nuts is that their family-centered, gated community mentality seems under assault by things beyond their control—mass media, the internet, mass entertainment, illegal immigration, drugs, gays running amuck, that sort of stuff. They cannot control the values their kids are exposed to; their homes are assaulted by new and radical ideas they way the sun’s radiation penetrates the roofs of their oversized houses. They assign most of the blame for social change to “liberals and Democrats.” Republican politicians are very effective at convincing them that they are a bastion against these un-American social changes (even while sole of their fellow Republicans are profiting mightily from those same changes).
It is the country-club Republicans who are exporting the W/C’s jobs to China and S. America, and who are also controlling the mass media (while using that same media to claim that it’s the “liberals and international Jewish conspiracy” who control the media) and are heavily invested in mass entertainment, profiting from illegal immigration, run both the legal and illegal drug cartels. They are the ones who corporations have the K Street lobbyists influencing public policy to increase the value of their stock positions, they are the ones with the high executive salaries, share options and pensions, from which they can mover, arbitrages, liquidate, or just screw up an industry (and the lives and communities of its workers) and head off to that chalet in Vail or waterfront mansion in Miami with a severance package that is larger than the GNP of some countries. A lot of this is “accepted” under that old Reaganesque social logic that, if people are rich they must have earned it, and id people are poor, they must be a bunch of lazy, "Cadillac welfare queens." So, if there are S&L scams, junk bonds, and sub prime cons, deregulation of everything in sight, lobbying, special favors and outright cheating, all for the sake of increasing corporate profit, well that’s the Darwinian (they wouldn’t use this term, of course) way of it. It is tolerated and envied, sort of the way in which Evangelical preachers are who rake in millions and live like aristocrats.
Which brings us to that other Republican cohort, the one that has really made an electoral and policy difference. Halleluiah! Praise Jesus! They are mostly small, town, rural, and Southern, but they spread across the W/Cs and the Suburban Republicans as well. They are the American Taliban, soldiers of Christ (at least the version of Christ they have conjured), and they want to lay siege to the wall that separates church and state (without sacrificing the tax break that churches get, of course). The flag, the little silver ichthus on the backs of the vehicles, or one of those “Support Our Troops” stick-on “ribbons” on the back of the SUV, are their insignia. America is God’s country, right or wrong, because even wrong we are right. They are a fusion of faith and patriotism (you can throw in football and NASCAR, too). They are values voters foremost—anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, ant-immigration, anti-medical marijuana, anti-Hillary, etc—and for replacing the Constitution with the Bible and sticking their values into the homes and schools that Republicans used to say should be protected from governmental intrusion. Of the lot, they are the Repugnantcans.
It
is a motley coalition of Republicans, with freaky threads of neo-Nazis, Log
Cabin Republicans, and such on the edges and in the cracks. But George W.
Bush might be bringing it to an end—if, the Democrats cannot find
a way to give them a re-unifying issue (like the way they did with pushing
gay marriage just before the 2004 election). Even Republicans have lamented
what has been termed the “hijacking” of their party. “Moderate” Republicans
are outnumbered by the Republicans you can find hanging out in airport men’s
rooms or preying on Congressional pages. But the leadership of the party might
be fracturing into different factions that want to take the helm in the post
Bush dynasty years: Huckabee representing the populist, Christian common man
faction; Romney, the corporatist, country-club ranks; McCain, the warrior-America
uber alles division; Paul, the quirky-cultish Libertarian fringe; Giuliani,
the phony “great homeland protector.” Only Romney comes close
to acceptability by party, maybe because he is a plastic-president pull-toy
whose weirdest feature is his Mormon underwear. A bigger bunch of “losers” would
be hard to assemble; but the Republicans are notorious for turning losers into
political winners. If you need confirmation of that, just tune into Bush’s
last (Oh, thank you Jesus!) State of the #*&%-ed-Up Union address.
________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp
48. 3: Three for Empire [Book Reviews] 1.17.2008
“The sun,” it used to be said, “never set on the British
Empire.” Somewhat the same might be said of the sunlight that streams
through my window onto my bookshelves. Chances are it will illuminate a title
that is about, or was influenced by the British Empire. After all, I reside
in a former British colony.
I think it was Tarzan movies that got me hooked on British imperialism. It was at its most molecular and most fundamental when British-accented Jane assents to her abduction by the “ape man.” That all seemed acceptable; boy meets girl, imperial power meets “dark continent.” The British has a “thing” for the untamed continent. Explorers like Livingston, Burton, Speke, and exploiters like Rhodes, were lured there by the prospect of fame and fortune, or both.
In may respects, the Tarzan movie was an analogue for colonization. Soon enough, Tarzan was speaking English (“Come, Jane, let’s do it again swinging from a vine.”) Tarzan was the “white guy who had ‘gone native,’” but then, after Jane, he was rescuing his fellow whites from surly “natives” (and native beasts) and was enlisted in subduing them as well. Jane’s outside world seductiveness introduced an ambiguity into Tarzan’s allegiances. Hence, Tarzan films had man of the dramaturgical elements tat made colonialism and imperialism interesting to me—the inter-cultural swirl of the intrusion of one culture into another, the way in which race, religion, gender and, always where the British were involved, class, clashed and modified one another. Drama is essentially conflict, and there is abundant conflict in empire building.
The three selections treated here by no means cover the range literature on the subject. They each deal with the British Empire in South Asia, one semi-autobiographical, another by an American, and the third is memoir by a “local.” Murder on the Verandah, by Dublin-born American writer Eric Lawlor, is subtitled “love and betrayal in British Malaya,” and takes its impetus from a murder by an English woman, wife of a British civil servant, of an associate of her husband’s who might have been her lover, possibly a rapist, that put her on trial that exposes many of the features of British colonialism in Asia in 1911. The author makes the point in the preface that “Two Englishmen, ne her [Malaya] and one at home, might easily be men of different race, language, and religion so different in their outlook and behavior.”
The British seemed to bring pretty much everything of their culture with them. Most declined to learn local languages and eat local foods, they imported their magazines and music, their sports and amusements such as horse racing, keeping much to their circadian schedules and habits, simply reproducing what they had left behind. However, the ad the advantage of doing this with the assistance of servants and other minions which most members of their class would never enjoy at home. We see evidence of these behaviors time and again in the works of E.M. Forster, Paul Scott, Conrad and Orwell, among man others.
The trial and aftermath of Mrs. Proudlock, who killed her fellow countryman with her husband’s revolver serves as a means for the author to explore the various dimensions of colonial life. Thr British seemedto develop a colonial pathology. There was the usual homesickness and boredom that comes from being separated from family and familiar surroundings. Men were often at their jobs away from the settlements (“Malaya was a man’s world”), leaving women on their own for long periods. Drinking and gossip were ways to fill the void, often at clubs established much for those pursuits. In Malaya, at least, there was a lot of what was called neurasthenia (a mental cocktail of lethargy, fatigue, irritability and depression) Malaya had a surprisingly high rate of suicide, twice the rate of self-destruction as in England, Part of this was attributable to business reverses (in Malaya it was rubber plantations), but strains on marriages also played a large part. There was also the constant threat of local diseases, especially malaria. The British didn’t seem to like their servants much, and the feeling was requited. They regarded one another with suspicion and through the lenses of ethic and racial bigotry.
Marital fidelity and race figure prominently in The Black Englishman, Carolyn Slaughter’s novel that is based heavily on the life of her maternal grandmother, whom she only came to know when she returned to England to spend her last years in a mental hospital. This story is in the same time period, but narrated by twenty-three year old Isabel Webb, who seeks adventure and escape from a dreary life in England by marrying a British military office posted to India. Isabel only gets to know Neville intimately on their way out aboard ship. But no sooner are they arrived at the military outpost in Northern India tan Neville decamps for some remote territorial outpost and pretty much and Isabel realizes that he is really married to the British army and is a man set in is routines and prone to violence.
In a military settlement with much gossip, booze and the occasional suicide Isabel survives as she starts to “go native,” something that is frowned upon, as is any unseemly relation between a memsahib and an Indian. Isabel defies most of the colonial conventions, befriending her older man-servant, learning Hindi, and eventually falling in love with and Indian physician. The naïve counterpart of “going native” for Oxford-educated Dr. Singh is to try to become a “black Englishman.” Isabel and Singh are co-adulterers, he having a wife with whom he spends little time. The relationship runs afoul, as these sorts of relationships always seem to do, of the disapproval of them by both ethnic groups. The return of Neville, bent upon violently avenging his being cuckholded, parts the inter-ethnic lovers and Isabel suffers mentally from being alone again.
A quite different perspective comes from the memoir of a young Singaporean-Chinese (called “Straits Chinese) girl. The Thorn of Lion City, by Lucy Lum, covers her childhood years during the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time when Singapore was still a British colony and much the product of Sir Stamford Raffles. Beyond the fact that she incorrectly thought the British would repel the invading Japanese in 1941, Lum does not have much to say about her overlords. What her story provides is a childhood level view of being from and immigrant group within a colonized society. But, being a child, the reality of her life is in the family and, by almost any western standard her’s was a supremely dysfunctional family. To a Brit, Lum’s family might have seemed the perfect justification as to why British civilization was needed in these parts. Being a girl (the third of seven children), Lum was at the low end of that family hierarchy. She is literally tortured by her mother and especially her maternal grandmother, Popo, who beats her for the slightest infraction and once burned her lips with a cigarette for telling (the truth) about her brother. She also inflicted her grandchildren with wretched herbal concoctions and bizarre superstitions.
The British literally pay no role in the life of Lum’s family, which is ruled by the senior women. It might have been a family straight out of southern China in the 19th century. Lum’s rather intellectual father was a linguist who supported the family as a translator. He knew enough Japanese to translate for the Japanese military and probably kept the family safe. For this he was browbeaten and vilified by his wife and her mother, and loved by young Lucy. The day he died his wife took up with another man. She had earlier consented to the giving away of one of her female children.
Also interesting is the prevalence of the muichai practice (called mui tsai, or “little sister,” in Hong Kong Cantonese) as late as the 1940s in Singapore. Muichai were girls who were literally sold, usually by their parent—in effect to become slaves in other households to be worked and exploited in other ways. Grandmother Popo beat and tortured them as well. Self-esteem among Chinese girls in these times was not very high.
These days Singapore is virtually run by Straits Chinese. The British hegemony has been gone since 1965, one of a string of jewels in Victoria’s necklace that has been surrendered along with India and Malaya, now Malaysia. At times the Empire was brutish as well a British. The record is mixed from the point of view of human relations, but the British were, as colonial powers go, far from the worst.
One as to place into this account perhaps the prime residual advantage of the Empire—not the English, but English. From a purely selfish point of view it has relieved me of being forced to acquire fluency in other languages. If maps, menus and street signage, professional journals and other forms of communication from political posters to museum displays are to be found in a non-local language it is likely to be English. English is the lingua franca of airlines, business, science and education—and the Internet. Through English, and educational systems based on it, many former colonies have been better positioned than other countries to participate in the global economy.
And
to think, one of the memorable lines from first encounters with English and
the English was “Me Tarzan; you Jane.”
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© 2008, James A. Clapp
48. 2: ON CURSING 1.9.2008
