When you walk through a town like this--two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in--when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons....
All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.
It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.--George Orwell (1939) Marrakech
Yesterday morning, while watching my son and his friends sell lemonade and cookies to raise money for the Grenfell Towers victims and the Royal Free -- a refrain they repeated all morning long, most effectively when they would corner a passer-by ready to climb up to the Heath -- on the South End, I was reminded, because I checked my email absentmindedly on my phone, that a promised tenure and promotion letter is due in two weeks; at once I recognized the foolishness of my intention to finish two overdue papers -- both in late stages of draft -- before I go on holiday this Friday (which becomes the de facto deadline for that tenure letter). After our lunch, we went to Daunt's to buy him a book, and there, while browsing, I noticed the Penguin edition of Orwell's Essays. I checked the index, and marked that "Reflections on Ghandi" -- an essay I blogged about admiringly, twice, in fact, [and here] -- was the last one. The collection lacks an editor and while I puzzled over my previous lack of curiosity about his other essays, my son called me from the sales counter; he was ready for me to pay for his selection. I grabbed the Essays and was secretly relieved when my son informed me he was too tired to frisbee and insisted on reading his book.
These days tourists still go to starved countries, but while for Orwell, "people with brown skins are next door to invisible," now the locals and their skin colors are noticed. I wouldn't say that it is the main purpose to return home from holiday in a packed, charter flight hungover while a kid is crying for the tablet in the row behind you, but we should not ignore the frisson of informing the neighbors, after some obligatory remarks about the shocking ways children are prostituted, that they lack sanitation and have too many babies, that we have a proper work ethic, and so on. (If you protest, my dear reader, that you would not be caught dead in a charter, I remind you of the pictures you posted on Instagram of yourself and your healthy friends enjoying a hearty meal after a day's volunteering in a dusty, crowded refugee camp.)* As Orwell puts it (in his remarkable essay, "Antisemitism in Britain,") "we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil."+
Orwell's Marrakech is about what it's like be an imperial master on the edge of the precipice, which is represented by the Senegalese soldiers, French citizens, who march by a "long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels." At that point there is,
one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?"
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
Orwell's point is not to deny that colonial empires are gained through military force. But, rather, to insist that empires are kept through a master-servant ideology in which the imperial rulers dehumanize the conquered in various ways [invisible work; mass-anonymity; seen as animals; etc.], and makes him the enforcer of his own chains. Orwell assumes here the power of (the propagandist's) education and military drilling. (I am probably not the first to notice that the characterization of totalitarianism in 1984, owes something to his experience of being on the empire's side in colonial rule.) Orwell's faith in the power of education is not infinite--it's a matter of time before the game is up, and the guns are turned--but he does not underestimate it either. But beneath the facade of virile, imperial strength, he reveals a quiet terror, so manifest today in America's behavior toward its blacks and the Europeans toward its 'non-natives,' that the tables will be turned.
In context, Orwell is not much interested in the phenomenology of the oppressed even though he is capable of generating sympathy for them. He does not make the leap into Ellison's perspective, avant la lettre. It's not because he is incapable of writing from perspectives other than his own (-- I will return to his treatment of passive helplessness in "Inside the Whale"), after all the essay starts with an imaginative interpretation of the behavior of flies.** But Orwell's topic is to chart a certain psychological void at the heart of "modern civilization." Orwell exhibits colonial mastery (with the rhetorical trick of making visible that which he claims stays invisible) in order to make expressible set of experiences that survive the fall of empire as such.
That is, I suspect dark skins may be noticed by tourists now because of the end of direct military rule. But our military and technological superiority has not ended. So, the relationships of subordination and superiority have not evaporated (merely displaced), and the dark skins encountered abroad are inevitably, it seems, tracked with narratives that extol our (non-existent) moral superiority over them.
The surge of fondness for closed border-walls is a sign of fearful weakness--not merely a wise recognition of limits, but a retreat. The desire to keep them out, is a collective admission of our terror that the game is nearly up and we'll be treated the way we raped and killed them.
I looked up from Orwell's essays, my mind uneasily shifting to the morning's scene with the happy children singing and dancing selling the fresh lemonade and delicious, sprinkled cookies and (ahh) brownies, and just then I refuse to finish my train of ideas. For, after we had installed ourselves at the cafe, I glanced furtively -- guiltily aware of my prior lack of interest -- at the title of of the book I had bought for my son, who was reading it hungrily; it was David Walliams' The World’s Worst Children 2.
*This is not a criticism of such volunteering; Orwell teaches that integrity is a complex relationship between external deeds and inner stance.
+My post assumes that Orwell shows that the cause of this lunacy is the widespread prevalence of structures of subordination.
As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.
The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women--threaded their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends.
Nice piece. But please: 'Gandhi'
Posted by: Mark N Lance | 07/18/2017 at 06:51 PM