Kingdom of Saudi Arabia King Saud University Deanship of Higher Studies Department of English
A Postcolonial Reading of Some of Saul Bellow’s Literary Works
A THESIS Submitted to the Department of English, En glish, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature.
Prepared by Ohood Foad Anbar ID# 424221247
Supervised by Prof. Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
2009
د دا ا ا ا ا ا د ا ا ا ت اا راادة ا دابا آ آ ا ا ا ا
د دا ل لأ أ را ا
ا ا
دابا ا ا ا ا ا وأدا ا ا ا ا ا ا ر در لا ت ا ل د ا ا
ادإ إ
اد د 424221247: ر ر
اف ا ا دق مإ إ:رةآ آاذة اا ا
2009
Acknowledgment
All thanks due to Allah for His blessing and graces. Neither words nor deeds should prove adequate to express my gratitude to Allah for the gift of knowledge and for guiding me throughout writing this thesis. I would like also to express my special thanks and gratitude to my advisor Professor Ebtisam Ali Ebtisam Ali Sadiq for her patience, dedication, valuable guidance, constructive criticism and for enriching my thesis with her insightful remarks. I'm greatly indebted to my husband for his endless support and for helping me in various ways in this research. Thanks due to my parents parents who taught me my first letters for their generous love and steady support in my educational pursuit. Without my parents’ and husband’s keen interest in my progress, I would not have reached this stage. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my kids for being a constant challenge in pursuing my higher studies.
I
إن. ر ريا ا ا ذا ا ا دب اا لا ح اأأ د دا ا ا را ا ر إن اه (1915-2005) ل ا ا (1976) ا سا ا إ ب إها و ا،(1959) ا ا نر ره ول ه إ إ ا ا ا ا إن ا . ا ا اءة اا ا د دا ة اءة لا ا را ا ب) ا ا ا ب ا د دا ا ا ز ز و و ى ا ة اا ا د ود تإ إ و و ا ا ا ا وا ا ه ه ريا ب اا ا ا ا آ آا ا و.( ر را و ا .ا ى ا ا اع ا ذ ذ با ا ل ا ا ذ ذ . و و ر ر ر ر ه ه رة با ول اا ا ا نا ا دا ا ا وا ا ا ا ا فا ا آ آ آ ياوا ا ا ريا ا ا اع اا ا ا ا ا ا .ا ا ز أن ا رااول ا . رةا وا ب ا اا ي اا ا ا از اإ إ و د دا وا ا ا ريا ا وا ا ح ا ا ا رااول ا و و، ولا ا ا ا اا ا ه وه .ولا ا ا ا ا ريا اا ا ا ا اه
II
Abstract The introduction of postcolonial theory into the field of literary criticism inspired new readings of Western colonialist literary texts. This thesis attempts to read two of Saul Bellow’s travel piece and expose the colonialist elements in them. A new dimension will be opened up to people who celebrate the humanistic values of his fiction. Reading Henderson the Rain King (1959) and To Jerusalem and Back (1976) from a postcolonial perspective helps disclose Bellow’s biased humanistic values which exclude the Arabs and Africans from its scope. This thesis highlights Bellow’s colonialist discourse and struggles for an assertion of an ethnic identity through a demeaning representation of the “Other.” The thesis is divided into two chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter one examines Henderson the Rain King and exposes Bellow’s latent colonialist representation of the Africans which demeans them by emphasizing their biological and cultural differences from the white man. It also highlights the role Bellow’s crisis of identity plays in the text. Chapter two continues to tackle Bellow’s question of identity in To Jerusalem and Back while fully investigating Bellow’s manifest colonialist ideology with regards to the PalestinianJewish cause. It highlights highlight s his racist attitude towards the Palestinians. The thesis finally provides hypotheses for the conversion in Bellow’s colonialist representation from latent in Henderson the Rain King to manifest in To Jerusalem and Back.
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Table of Contents
Page Acknowledgment
I
Abstract
II
Table of contents
IV
Introduction:
Identity and the “Other”
1
Henderson the Rain King: Masked Racism
10
To Jerusalem and Back: Unmasked Racism
57
Chapter One:
Chapter Two:
Conclusion
100
Bibliography
105
IV
Anbar 1 Introduction Identity and the “Other”
The twentieth-century American writer Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is an author of thirteen novels, a play, a number of book reviews, a collection of short stories as well as several critical essays on literature. Son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bellow grew up in the slums of Montreal, Canada, before moving with his family to Chicago in the USA. He began his academic life studying English literature, switching later on to Anthropology and Sociology. Bellow’s multicultural background aided his remarkable intellect and added richness to his literary works. He was awarded several prizes for his work including the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes in 1976. Bellow has a keen interest in the suffering of humanity. His fiction includes blistering criticism of post World War II life in modern America. It has been claimed that he is one of the greatest humanistic authors of his time. He is also an ardent socialist who believes that “it [is] the rights of the individual that [matter]” (Atlas 65). His concerns about humanity and advocacy of individuality are, however, dualistic in nature as they include certain races and exclude others. His portrayal of the suffering of some human beings remains incomplete because it makes an “Other” of some nations, a colonial practice objected to and exposed by postcolonial literary theory and criticism. In the colonial discourse, the concept of the “Other” (the reference to people outside the self) is integral to racial representation and the colonialist enterprise. The concept of otherness derives its significance from diversity between opposite poles of power. It is instrumental to the marginalization of the colonized and self-identification of the colonizer. Bill Ashcroft exposes this colonialist meaning saying that “it can refer to the colonized others who are marginalized by imperial discourse, identified by their difference from the centre and, perhaps crucially, become the focus of anticipated mastery by the imperial ‘ego’” (Post-Colonial Studies: They Key Concepts 170). The colonizer’s creation of the “Other” as peripheral creates him as a center. The purpose of establishing difference between the colonizer and the colonized maintains the colonial relation
Anbar 2 which is characterized by the superiority of the colonizer and inferiority of the colonized. Othering is necessary to the colonizer’s self-definition. Without the presence of the colonized as the “Other,” the colonizer cannot practice hegemony in a way that attests to identity. Bellow’s racial presentation of the “Other” is essential to the formation of his identity. His othering practice suggests the perception of him as a racist, although he denies being a racist. On being asked about the relations between the Jews and Blacks in America, he replied: “I do not consider myself a racist, and I think people who call me a racist are very wrong” (Singh 6). His fiction, as this study attempts to prove, contradicts this statement. His racialized attitude towards both Arabs and Blacks places his fiction at the centre of controversy. Bellow segregates between his people, Jews and Americans, and Arabs and Africans. He depicts the American and Jewish people in his work as victims. Americans are victims of World War II and the various antagonistic forces of modern society. The American protagonists of his fiction usually suffer depression, self-alienation, failure, dismay, self-loathing, self-punishment and spiritual agony as a result of the upheaval of both World War II and modernism. In addition, Jews are represented as victims of the injustices of Arabs’ and Nazis’ persecution. By contrast, there seems to be a stream of racism and prejudice against Arabs and Africans that runs throughout his fiction. He strategically devalues their cultures and dehumanizes them by representing them as uncivilized, barbaric and sluggish. His misrepresentation and segregation compel a postcolonial reading of his fiction, for it is important to expose how Bellow’s presumed humanistic presentation denigrates Africans and the Arabs of Palestine, in favor of Americans and Jews. Hence, this study falls within the frame of postcolonial criticism as it intends to expose the colonialist ideology in two of Bellow’s works: Henderson the Rain King (1959) (this book will be abbreviated henceforth as HRK ) and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) (this book will be abbreviated henceforth as TJB). These two works retrospectively expose Bellow’s colonialist ideology and his racism against the Africans and the Arabs. Interestingly, both works are
Anbar 3 Travel Literature: Henderson the Rain King is a fictional travel piece and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account is a personal travel account. Travel is often synonymous with a longing for the unknown: an opportunity for geographical, religious, cultural and cartographical exploration and documentation. In the colonial discourse, the traveler’s quest is for a new and different nation, in its thoughts or land. It is more of a desire to know the “Other” and a tendency for comparability. This element of comparability, as a general mode, may or may not show all the time, but it is evident in Saul Bellow’s two selected works. The travel writer works with a binary system of comparison. The comparability factor of Travel Literature creates a perpetual comparison between the traveler’s background and the places being explored. He can be either subjective or objective. Susan Bassnett suggests that the travel writer’s background formulates his thoughts, “travel writers constantly position themselves in relation to their point of origin in a culture and the context they are describing (sic)” (99). Her suggestion alludes to the subjective involvement of authors in writing travel accounts and the possibility of authors developing hegemonic discourse. This is applicable to Bellow’s work as will be seen in chapter one and two. Travel Literature is actually closely related to the colonial encounter. Colonialism was a form of expansion that the Europeans took in many parts of the world, especially in Africa and Asia during the nineteenth century under the cover of exploration. The late nineteenth century was the time of high colonialism 1875-1914 (Boehmer 3). It was marked by military subversion, political domination, capitalist exploitation, cultural hegemony and racial discrimination. The colonizer’s self image was that of a civilizer and conqueror of primitive peoples and lands. Opposition to Eurocentric attitudes within the colonies was violently and forcefully suppressed. Consequently, the colonized began to speak of the liberation of the colonies. Postcolonialism is a political theory that articulates and encourages resistance of colonization. Elleke Boehmer defines postcoloniality “as that condition in which colonized peoples
Anbar 4 seek to take their place, forcibly or otherwise, as historical subjects” (3). Postcolonialism attacks the inequality in power relations and the falseness of the imperial dream of analyzing the colonized. It emphasizes the subverted people’s need for identity and freedom. As a theory of literary criticism, postcolonialism is a deconstructive appraisal and evaluation of colonialist works. My thesis adopts a postcolonial prospective in order to expose the colonialist ideology in Henderson the Rain King, and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. These two works by Bellow are selected for their components of colonialist literature. They include stereotyped language and images of domination and subordination as well as suggest rightness of colonization and superiority of certain cultures. Henderson the Rain King contains an unfavorable portrayal of Africa and its people, which Bellow carefully masks. To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account demonstrates an overt western misanthropy and an unjust perception of the Arabs. Bellow’s colonialist attitude and its diverse manifestations deserve attention. This study will attempt to expose, from a postcolonial perspective, the contradiction between the surface claims of the text and its underlying colonialist ideology in Henderson the Rain King, and the manifest colonialist ideology in To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. It also seeks to locate the implicit and explicit colonialist ethos within the selected works, highlighting in the meanwhile the role ethnic identity plays in his fiction. The issue of identity is deeply rooted in the debate of postcolonialism. In postcolonial discourse, culture represents identity. Culture means being and becoming. According to Edward Said, culture is a source of identity. It “includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best known and thought . . .” (Culture and Imperialism xii). He derives this definition of culture from Matthew Arnold. According to Arnold, culture homogenizes: the society returns to its best known traditions and thoughts to differentiate it from other societies. Culture, thus, gives the society its own unique identity. The situation is complicated when the construction of one national identity rests on the process of deconstructing or “belittling” other cultures. Such a hegemonic practice can lead to
Anbar 5 clashes between nations. The subverted groups usually struggle to achieve identity. The practice of “belittling” others, however, may drive some people to disclaim their ethnic identity in order to avoid the stigma of cultural inferiority—being the “Other”—and to seek instead to belong to the centre of power. Identity plays an important role in the life and art of Saul Bellow. He is highly aware of ethnic identity as an identifier of the individual, as well as a determining factor of the individual’s fate. Therefore, he insists on being identified as an American writer rather than a Russian, Canadian, or Jewish immigrant. He seems keen on rejecting any classification of himself as a minority member and refuses to be marginalized (Cronin xi). Bellow voices his rejection of Jewishness in several interviews. Unwilling to be fettered by his past, he refers to his roots in an interview in 1973 with Joyce Illig as “tangled old wires” (107). More emphatically, Bellow asserts in an interview with Rockwell Gray in 1984: “I knew there would be no place for me as a Jew in that kind of civilization” (220). Bellow’s inferiority complex stimulates him to assimilate into the dominant American culture. Nonetheless, many scholars assert that Bellow is Jewish “to the marrow.” In his biographical work, Bellow, James Atlas indicates that “however secular, American and universal, [Bellow’s] work was profoundly rooted in his identity as a Jew. His characters, so robustly American in their actions and appearance, were [yet] unmistakably Jewish in their sensibilities and the intonations of their speech” (291). In short, there is a contradiction between what Bellow really is and what he claims to be. Although he renounces his Jewishness, he cannot escape it because, “the marginal Jew oscillates forward and backward, out of his group and then back into his group” (Stonequist 33). Bellow assimilates into one group but his attention turns back to another. His selfconception as both Jew and American generates a crisis of identity, as he “fluctuate[s] from one position to another—at one time reaching a satisfactory adjustment, then being thrown back again into a condition of conflict” (Stonequist 123). This fluctuation between ethnic identities—in terms of national origins— can be seen in Henderson the Rain King and To Jerusalem and Back.
Anbar 6 Bellow’s American ethnicity is brought to the fore in the former whilst his Jewish ethnicity supersedes in the latter. The intense conflict of Bellow’s double consciousness and ethnic adjustment is mirrored in the paradox of his character and writing, thus creating ambivalence. Everett V. Stonequist in The Marginal Man locates “ambivalence of attitude and sentiment” at “the core” of the marginal personality (146). Because of Bellow’s racial and cultural hybridity, he develops a divided loyalty between old identity and new identity with an ambivalent attitude. This duality and paradoxical nature accounts for Bellow’s contradictory opinions and actions. Gillian Bottomley confirms the prominence of Bellow’s ethnicity in his fiction: “[T]he most illustrious graduate in anthropology at the University of Chicago is the Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, whose novels include brilliant accounts of . . . the nuances of ethnicity” (1). He projects his persecution as a Jew and minority member on third world nations, namely the Africans and Arabs. Bellow’s position as an immigrant, and feeling of estrangement, accounts for the racial segregation in his fiction. He imposes his ethnicity through a colonialist and racialized discourse. His colonialist discourse, “categorizes, evaluates, ranks and differentiates between groups” (Wetherell 43). Colonial discourse reproduces images of powerful binary oppositions: self/Other, white/black, dominant/subordinate, civilized/primitive, etc. Binary oppositions, in the colonial discourse, are “open to the charge of being reductional and over-simplified, swallowing up all distinction in their rather two-part structure” (Hall 235). They are, however, crucial for all classification because one “must establish a clear difference between things in order to classify them” (Hall 236). Hall’s speech suggests the correlation between binarism and classification thus leading to the idea of dichotomies. Fanon finds dichotomy a characteristic element in creating the colonial world: “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments” (37). The dichotomy concept finds its counterpart in Abdul R. JanMohamed’s ideology of Manichean allegory. This
Anbar 7 ideology is dualistic: “In the post-colonial studies, Manicheanism is a term for the binary structure of imperial ideology” (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Studies: They Key Concepts 134). Besides binary oppositions, the colonial discourse involves rhetoric. As argued by many scholars, colonial discourse appears in subversive rhetoric. Spurr believes that the colonial discourse, “designate[s] a space within language that exists both as a series of historical instances and as a series of rhetorical function” (The Rhetoric of Empire 7). Boehmer also asserts the association between rhetoric and colonialist discourse. According to him, the colonialist discourse “can be taken to refer to that collection of symbolic practices, including textual codes and conventions and meanings, which Europe deployed in the process of its colonial expansion and, in particular, in understanding the bizarre and apparently unintelligible strangeness with which it came into contact” (50). The colonizer uses language persuasively in his colonial enterprises to express his colonialist ideology with regard to the colonized place and its people. As an instrument of power, the colonial discourse has a purpose that is “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origins, in order to justify conquest and establish system of administration and instruction” (Bhabha 101). In other words, colonial discourse becomes a tool of ethnic belittling to rationalize colonization. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson affirm in “Introduction: The Textuality of Empire,” the function of colonial discourse as a “vehicle for taunting” (4). Spurr provides another objective: “Colonial discourse . . . naturalizes the process of domination: it finds a natural justification for the conquest of nature and of primitive peoples, those ‘children of nature’” (156). Thus, the objective of colonial discourse is to justify or naturalize European colonization and emphasize the difference between the colonizers and colonized. The tendency to naturalize colonization is part of Bellow’s nature. Colonial discourse, I believe, implies the language that is chosen strategically to obliterate the identity of the “Other” in order to build one’s own identity. It is a medium through which the hierarchal structure of power is established to indicate difference between the colonized and the colonizer.
Anbar 8 The infrastructure of Bellow’s racist and colonialist discourse is manifested in his creation of binary oppositions through racial stereotyping and othering processes. Stereotyping is a characteristic feature of the colonial discourse. It eliminates heterogeneity and assumes homogeneity within the object perceived or described. To stereotype is to generalize and form prejudices. Bellow develops negative stereotypes when it comes to the “Other” but positive ones when he refers to the Jewish or American race. The Arabs are reduced to terrorists and savages, and Africans to primitives. The infrastructure of Bellow’s stereotypical thinking is fantasy among others. Homi Bhabha believes that fantasy is at the core of stereotyping: The stereotypes, then, as the primary point of subjectification in colonial discourse, for both colonizer and colonized, is the scene of a similar fantasy and defence—the desire for an originality which is again threatened by the difference of race, colour and culture
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the stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false
representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in signification of psychic and social relation. (107) Bhabha not only regards fantasy a major component of stereotyping but he also criticizes stereotyping because it entails fixation and obliteration of distinctiveness. Stereotyping develops a fixation behavior with regard to the “Other” and denies his individuality. Hall stresses the importance of fantasy to stereotyping, “stereotypes refer as much to what is imagined in fantasy as to what is perceived as ‘real.’” (263). Stereotyping is a significant colonial practice to create the “Other.” The concept of the otherness is predominated by the inequality of power in relations and the binary logic. Boehemer argues that “the concept of the Other . . . signifies that which is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined” (21). It serves as a means “to justify dispossession of the natives” within the colonial
Anbar 9 relation (Boehemer 51). The colonial other operates the imperial binary logic of domination and subordination. Psychologically, it is a kind of projection where the negative characteristics of the self are most projected on the “Other.” Essentialist ideas are at the heart of the debate regarding the “Other.” The colonizer’s notion of the “Other” is determined by certain negative characteristics that control his view of the “Other.” The “Other” is usually “reduced to a few essentials, fixed in nature by a few simplified characteristics” (Hall 249), thus denying the distinctiveness and individuality of the “Other” and homogenizing them. This thesis intends to explore Bellow’s racist ideology pertaining to Africans and Arabs in order to expose how his essentialist ideas guide his demeaning depiction of both races. It will also examine his authorial intervention in these two works. With this as my focus, a postcolonial evaluation of Bellow’s texts is expected to show Bellow’s relentless “othering” process and stereotyping of these races. I will attempt to offer an explanation of the contrastive modes of his colonialist representations and seek to locate the implicit and explicit colonialist themes within the selected works. In chapter one I shall probe Bellow’s latent colonialist themes, through the application of various rhetorical models. The intention is to expose Bellow’s linear presentation of Africans, a presentation that undermines the humanistic claims often accredited to Bellow. I will focus in chapter two on the author’s deliberate presence in and intense relation to the text. I will examine the relationship of the work to his Jewish ethnicity, and how “othering” and stereotyping Arabs are necessary factors in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This process will further question his presumed humanistic values. The concluding chapter offers an assessment of both works, again, from a postcolonial perspective. It also will attempt to provide an explanation as to why Bellow masks his racism in Henderson the Rain King and unmasks it in To Jerusalem and Back.
Anbar 10
Chapter One Henderson the Rain King: Masked Racism In Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow creates a latent racial discourse which serves to support American ethnicity through a negative portrayal of Africa and its people. This chapter explores how American ethnocentrism has the lead in Saul Bellow’s representation of the Africans in Henderson the Rain King. Bellow puts the Africans at the bottom of the ladder of the human race through a covert stereotyping and “othering” processes which help his protagonist, Henderson, assert identity. Henderson leaves to Africa full of uncertain feelings about his past and what he wants to do at the present. His colonial enterprise in Africa allows him to achieve self-fulfillment through de-civilizing and dehumanizing the Africans. The latent colonialist ideology of Bellow in Henderson the Rain King necessitates special techniques to detect it. I will use Edward Said and David Spurr as guides. Emphasis will be put in this chapter on the rhetorical modes of the work in order to reflect the hidden levels of Bellow’s colonialist ideology and racialized discourse of Africa and its people. These modes are produced and reproduced in the author’s discourse. To expose Bellow’s latent racial politics of representation in this work, there is a need for Said’s “contrapuntal reading” as a way to expose the deep colonial implications hidden in the text. Such reading helps reveal the other dimension that remains unspoken in the story. I am also concerned with the author’s “strategic location” in the text “which is a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about” (Orientalism 20) in order to unveil Bellow’s masked colonialist ideology in the novel. Bellow’s presence in the text is indisputable and makes it essential to read the text from a postcolonial perspective. I also seek to examine Henderson the Rain King through the prism of David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993). Spurr’s book suggests some rhetorical modes that are appropriate tools for a “contrapuntal reading” which will help assess Bellow’s work from a postcolonial perspective. Spurr offers twelve rhetorical modes present in journalism, travel writing and imperial
Anbar 11 administration. He devises separate chapters to discuss “surveillance, appropriation, aesthesticization, classification, debasement, negation, affirmation, idealization, insubstantialization, naturalization, eroticization, and resistance.” I will utilize some of Spurr’s rhetorical modes that are relevant to this study such as “surveillance, debasement, affirmation and eroticization.” Because rhetorical modes usually overlap as Spurr indicates (4), other modes such as “classification, negation and idealization” will appear in this study as subcategories of others. For example, “debasement” encompasses “classification” whereas “idealization” is a repetition of “affirmation.” Without these modes the invisible colonialist modes will remain dormant and Henderson the Rain King will be read only as a humanistic text or as a whimsical fantasy. Spurr believes that tracing colonial discourse is the key to disclosing the colonialist themes in travel writing and imperial administration. It operates through the rhetorical features. His definition of the colonial discourse emphasizes language as an important factor in the identification process: [L]iterary works once studied primarily as expression of traditionally Western ideals are now also read as evidence of the manner in which such ideals have served in the historical process of colonization. The particular languages which belong to this process, enabling it while simultaneously being generated by it, are known collectively as colonial discourse. (1) In retrospect, colonial discourse refers to the language that is used strategically to serve the colonizer’s hegemonic purposes. It is a tool of subversion that reflects the colonizer’s desire to master. I will deal in this chapter with Bellow’s colonial discourse and his strategy of debasing the Africans by means of stressing their biological discrepancies which aims at affirming the protagonist’s American identity. Bellow employs particular association of traits to cast the Africans as ethnically sexual and exotic beings. I will also rely on dialogue analysis to further examine the repressive communicative method inherent in his racialized and colonialist discourse.
Anbar 12 Bellow’s American ethnicity is a prominent feature of his works. Americanism has had a pervading influence on him because his father “was all for Americanism,” as he used to tell him, “this really is the land of opportunity; you’re free either to run yourself into the ground or improve your chances” (Cronin et al, 256). Bellow has inherited his father’s enthusiasm for America. James Atlas emphasizes Bellow’s love for Americanism, claiming that “the process of becoming American [was] one of his major themes” (19). Bellow insists on being identified as only an American writer. He simply chooses not to be an “Other” and to become an American instead. Bellow’s immigrant position is integral to his ethnicity and racialized discourse. Realizing the position of America as a superpower, Bellow pronounces in an interview with Rockwell Gray (1984): “Therefore all the greater was my enthusiasm for embracing this American democracy with all its crudities” (220). He adopts Americanism for the freedom it allows and the universality of American democracy, “I assume American democracy to be a cosmopolitan phenomenon” (Gray 220). World War II, however, comes as an opposition to such principles. Therefore, Bellow criticizes the outcomes of post World War II life in modern America. His interest in the suffering of Americans as a result of the war and modernism abounds profusely within Henderson the Rain King. The text is highly charged with humanistic concerns of the fallen conditions of the American man. He sympathizes with Eugene Henderson who belongs to a privileged class endowed with language, education and wealth. Eugenic is a Greek word which means of a good offspring (Webester 399). The name implies one of a good background or lineage. Henderson brags about his inherited imperialist practices: “My ancestors stole land from the Indians. They got more from the government and cheated other settlers too, so I became heir of a great state” (HRK 21). He is born a millionaire due to his ancestors’ imperialist exploitation of the Indians. This speech foreshadows the later revelation of Henderson’s imperialistic approach towards the Africans and his exploitation of them. However, Henderson has a displacement that compels him to venture into Africa. Henderson’s experience with the two African tribes, the Arnewi and Wariri, that he
Anbar 13 encounters in his trip, is rich with features of hegemony and is masked by fantasy about people and place. The American centrality is high in scale when juxtaposed against his depiction of a peripheral Africa. Henderson is solipsistic. His interest in Africa springs from his narcissistic needs. His main reason is that he feels worthless, a “bum” (HRK 3). His other reason for leaving to Africa is his need to face up to his life: “But if I am to make sense to you people and explain why I went to Africa I must face up to facts” (HRK 3). I believe explanation of the matter of Africa as facts sounds like a very early defense against any accusation of prejudice feelings towards the Africans or racism on the author’s or Henderson’s side. Lack of purpose is another reason for Henderson’s journey: “Well, then, it must have been about eight years after the war ended, I was divorced from Frances and married to Lily, and I felt that something had to be done. I went to Africa with a friend of mine, Charlie Albert” (HRK 22). He attributes his emptiness to the chaos of modern American life: “America is so big, everybody is working, making, digging, bulldozing, trucking, loading, and so on, and I guess the sufferers suffer at the same rate. Everybody wanting to pull together. I tried every cure you think of. Of course in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness” (HRK 25). Cultural chaos is another drive for Henderson. He hopes to find a remedy for his dissatisfaction and to escape the turbulent style of American life. He will use every possible way regardless of the means. He will debase, classify, stereotype, negate and eroticize the Africans in order to affirm and idealize himself. All go as part of the process of reconstructing his identity. Henderson decides to leave behind his civilized, but chaotic, American society in search of self-assertion in the abyss of Africa. Donald W. Markos states: “Henderson often seems to stand as a symbol for America itself—an America in need of change” (Bach et al, 109). This symbolic function mirrors the primacy of Bellow’s ethnocentrism in the text. Frank Farley theorizes that America is a “T country” because its culture encourages the risk-taking explorer (qtd in Gallagher 164). The way Henderson ventures into the unknown suggests that he is a “Type-T,” a thrill
Anbar 14 seeking person who likes risk, change, intensity, complexity and novelty, things that are indicatives of his American identity. Henderson, in his quest, resembles Bellow who “was a great believer in the quest for the essential self” (Atlas 73). Bellow has turned to sexual and mystical teachings to discover his own self. Another reason for Henderson’s departure is in fact due to his housekeeper’s sudden death at his place: “So Miss Lenox went to the cemetery, and I went to Idlewild and took a plane [to Africa]” (HRK 40). Her death makes him selfishly think of his own, fear it and try to escape it. There is a significant connection between the author and his protagonist in the previous response to death. Just like Henderson, Bellow also fears death: when his closest friend “Sam Rosenf[i]eld” (Atlas 235) died in 1956, he did not attend the funeral. Once again, when Pat Covici, his publisher, died in 1964, Bellow admitted that he loathes funerals. Going against the theory of Ronald Barth’s “Death of the Author” (1977), Bellow’s position in the text is deeply complex; his writing mirrors his beliefs. Sara Cohen postulates this presence as typical of Bellow: “Bellow permits his protagonists to be his ‘intellectual conscience’” (15). I find Henderson no exception to this rule because he articulates Bellow’s American ethnicity and colonialist ideological position which are shaped by his immigrant status. His presence in this work provides a tension about that presence. Bellow confesses to Maggie Simmons (1979): “Luckily for all of us, we work from deeper motives, impulses of which we are not conscious” (Cronin et al, 167). Consequently, I believe, he manipulates Henderson to articulate his own colonialist stance from the Africans. He hides behind him. Bellow’s incontrovertible presence in the novel is an imperial display of power. As a matter of fact, Bellow has a special affection for Henderson. He uses his characterization to diffuse details of his own life in the novel, such as his psychological, social and marital struggles. Henderson and Bellow can be considered more or less the same person in this literary work. Eusebio L. Rodrigues hints at this saying: “Bellow has been accused of writing a
Anbar 15 solipsistic fiction, dominated by the consciousness of one individual who is presented uncritically and who, in important respects, may be Bellow himself” (Bach et al, 122). Henderson’s colonialist intentions are stated from the beginning: “But I had come to this continent to stay.” He is so convinced that he can find what has been lacking in his own life in Africa so he “decided to take it one way” (HRK 42). This is one place where he can find peace with himself: “Anyway, since I had come to this place under the circumstances described, it was natural to greet it with certain emotion. Yes, I brought a sizeable charge with me and I kept thinking: ‘Bountiful life! Oh, how bountiful life is.’ I felt I might have a chance here” (HRK 43). Yet, his statement: “At the same time I couldn’t help being aware of the discrepancies between us,” (HRK 89) discloses that his presence in Africa promotes his awareness of the racial and cultural discrepancies between America and Africa and betrays as well the colonizer’s sense of superiority. He cannot get over the difference which he finds daunting and irrepressible. He needs to recognize the “Other” as savage in order to identify himself as civilized. This fact creates the savage/civilized dichotomy that is necessary to the colonizer’s existence. Spurr highlights the essentiality of this difference in the colonial relationship: “The colonizer’s traditional insistence on difference from the colonized establishes a notion of the savage as the ‘Other,’ the antithesis of civilized value” (7). Henderson’s attachment to the principle of “class” as definer/signifier of the person’s position in society is both bourgeois and colonialist ideology. It is situated at the heart of race purity. Class is important to him as a means of social division and segregation: “When it came time to marry I tried to please [my father] and chose a girl of our own social class” (HRK 4). He also bombastically states, “for when it comes to struggling I am in a special class” (HRK 68). Class is the criterion by which he classifies and judges people. He describes the African Mtalba, the queen’s sister, as “typical of a certain class of elderly lady” (HRK 71). He demands to be judged by the same criterion. He asks Itelo, the prince of Arnewi, about the tribe’s opinion of him: “‘Do they have a good opinion of me, Itelo? Is that a fact?’ I said. / ‘Very good. Primo. Class A.
Anbar 16 they admire how you look, and also they know you beat me’” (HRK 75). The black man is using the white man’s rhetoric. Henderson puts words into Itelo’s mouth to highlight his own superiority. Comedy and fantasy are two techniques that Bellow uses to mask his colonial ideology and manipulates his readers. Bellow’s fantasy about Africa is extravagantly colonialist in its idiom and scope. Bellow derives ideas from books but the exaggeration springs from his imagination. Boehmer argues that “because colonial authority expressed its dominance in part through medium of representation, a colonialist work of imagination functioned as instrument of power” (51). Imagination enables the colonialist writer to move freely between spaces and times to create the degrading influence he intends. It empowers him to depict unusual images and episodes to serve his colonialist aims. The effect of these unusual descriptions in Henderson the Rain King casts Africa in exotic lights characterized by primitivism. Comedy functions subtly to distract reader’s attention away from the colonialist underpinning of the novel. It creates an ambivalence that precludes genuine understanding of its bearings. Sara Cohen believes that: “Bellow chooses the comic mode, since it does not depict man in either extreme” (HRK 6). Her belief exposes Bellow because it asserts his internal desire to disguise his real intentions. Frequently, Henderson resembles a clown with his impetus actions, painted smile and artificial jollity. The elements of comedy also manifest themselves in Henderson’s peculiarity of cloth, inappropriate behavior, disproportionate body size, hilarious dramatic sense of events and absurdity of behavior. Circumspectly, Bellow infuses such elements from the beginning to cloud suspicions about his protagonist’s real intentions. When Henderson ponders over his fallen conditions, he dramatically cries listing all what he thinks is important to him in life, “my parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lesson, my drunkenness, my prejudice, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul” (HRK 3). He describes how he ridiculously spends the afternoon on a ladder to shake out books for money which his father uses as bookmarkers. He admits it is charitable of his father to forgive his enormous bodybuilding: “At birth I weighted fourteen pounds,
Anbar 17 and it was a tough delivery. Then I grew up. Six feet four inches tall. Two hundreds and thirty pounds. An enormous head, rugged with hair like Persian lambs’ fur. Suspicious eyes, usually narrowed” (HRK 4). He is sarcastic. He absurdly narrates how he once fell off a tractor while drunk and ran himself over and broke his leg. He brags about the way he embarrasses his wife, Lily, with his inappropriate cloth and eccentric attitude: Lily is, for instance, entertaining ladies and I come in with my filthy plaster cast, in sweat socks; I am wearing a red velvet dressing gown which I bought at Sulka’s in Paris in a mood of celebration when Frances said she wanted a divorce. In addition I have on a red wool hunting cap. And I wipe my nose and mustache on my fingers and then shake hands with guests, saying, “I’m Mr. Henderson, how do you do?” And I go to Lily and shake her hand, too, as if she were merely another lady guest, a stranger like the rest. (HRK 5) Knowing that Lily’s father has committed suicide, he teases her with his threat to do the same. Furthermore, his sudden and impulsive departure to Africa in quest of identity does not present a serious image of him; he appears rather comically impulsive. In Africa, he becomes absurdly attached to his white helmet by ridiculously making meticulous adjustments to it all the time. He is using it as a hiding place: “My white helmet, with passport, money, and papers taped into it, fell off . . .” (HRK 64). Bellow deploys this comic aspect to trivialize the seriousness of Henderson’s ethnic prejudice against the Africans and mask his manipulation of them as a means to escape his crisis of identity. Henderson’s quest for assertion of identity in Africa compels him to degrade the natives through racial “othering” and stereotyping. The rhetorical modes implied in Henderson the Rain King are revealing agents of his “othering” and stereotyping of the Africans. They expose his masked colonialist ideology. One of the rhetorical modes evident in Henderson the Rain king is Spurr’s “surveillance.” By surveillance, the colonizer masters “the gaze” over landscapes, bodies, interiors and persons as suggested by Spurr. It involves inspection, scrutiny, observation and
Anbar 18 examination in a way that makes the colonizer feel powerful. This visual observation provides Henderson with knowledge of the colonized. It reflects his colonial “knowledgeable position” (Boehmer 71). It is a kind of command over the colonized. Spurr agrees with Boehmer on the advantage of the colonizer’s commanding view as it “offers aesthetic pleasure on the one hand, information and authority on the other” (15). In the colonial world, to know is to control. Spurr emphasizes the hegemonic nature of surveillance: “To look and speak to not only implies a position of authority; it also constitutes the commanding act itself” (14). It gives the colonizer the sense that the colonized are manageable. This colonial achievement is valuable to Henderson’s identity. Surveillance is an essential part of Henderson’s colonial relation to the Africans. His visual observation determines the nature of his relation to the Africans as well as helps reconstruct his identity. His first practice of surveillance is of landscapes. Henderson invokes Romilayu, a native guide, “to show [him] uncivilized parts of Africa. There are very few of these left” (HRK 281). His remark sounds imperialistic because it corresponds to the colonizer’s dream to find undiscovered lands. He describes the African landscape with a colonial imaginative eye that grants him knowledge and authority. In the colonialist discourse, “nature is opposed to culture and civilization” (Spurr 156). Henderson’s Africa is depicted as exotic and untamed. Henderson’s geographical and environmental surveillance of the landscapes denotes American superiority over the humble nature of Africa: Africa reached my feelings right away even in the air, from which it looked like the ancient bed of mankind. At the height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone like smelters’ puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. (HRK 42) With a commanding imaginative eye, he lessens the significance of the land by minimizing its size. This belittling is pertinent to the colonizer’s desire to control the land.
Anbar 19 The sense of mastery which Henderson feels at first sight initiates him to place savagery next to delicacy in his perception and description of landscape: The water here was very soft, with reeds and roots rotted, and there were crabs in the sand. The crocodiles boated around in the lilies, and when they opened their mouths they made me realize how hot a damp creature can be inside. The birds went into their jaws and cleaned their teeth. . . . On the trees grew a featherlike bloom and the papyrus reeds began to remind me of funeral plumes. (HRK 43) This ambivalent attitude towards nature is part of Bellow’s masked racist strategy. The reader cannot determine whether Henderson likes or dislikes it. But dark images hover over nature in Henderson’s Africa. Nature is gloomy and sterile: “The mountains were naked, and often snakelike in their forms, without trees, and you could see the clouds being borne on the slopes. From this rock came vapor, but it was not like ordinary vapor, it cast a brilliant shadow” (HRK 46). Again ambivalence becomes evident. Henderson’s aesthetic description of the mountains also evokes a sense of isolation about the place. Isolation of place is very important to Bellow’s protagonist’s civilizing mission. Henderson chooses to go into the depth of Africa as he tells Romilayu, his native guide: “I told him I would give [the jeep] to him if he would take me far enough. He said the place he was going to guide me to was so remote we could reach it only on foot” (HRK 44). The isolation and antiquity of the place fascinate him when he first arrives at the place of the Arnewi: “And besides, the antiquity of the place had struck me so, I was sure I had got into someplace new” (HRK 53). This image suggests the Africans’ isolation from civilization and the advanced world, making them a special breed to his colonialist eyes. The act of isolating the colonized makes the colonizer appear powerful and in control which means that the landscape is fertile for his civilizing mission. Henderson’s observation of the primitivism of the place: “This is a very primitive part of the world. Even the rocks look primitive” (HRK 282), is exaggerated in expression. Rocks cannot be more primitive in Africa than elsewhere. Primitivism is the very reverse of modernization.
Anbar 20 Unconsciously, Henderson’s sense of American modernization surfaces by emphasizing the primitivism of Africa. This indication of the place as well its people as primitive “grants dominion over the earth to more advanced people; the land shall belong by natural right to that power which understands its value and is willing to turn it to account” (Spurr 156). In this case, Henderson is such power when he practices his dominance through surveillance. Henderson is proud that “it was all simplified and splendid, and I felt I was entering the past—the real past, no history or junk like that. The prehuman past” (HRK 46). Ambivalence surfaces in “simplified” and “splendid.” Simplified is a reductionist strategy to facilitate invasion, penetration and appropriation. Henderson is appropriating history in a colonialist manner. His crisis of identity that resulted from the chaos of modern life in America impels him to deconstruct the “Other’s” identity as a way to overcome his crisis. Bellow situates the Africans in a pre-historic status which indirectly demeans their culture and subsequently honors his. It is a central element in the constitution of the self in opposition to the “Other.” Henderson is really entranced by the prehistoric effect of the place: “I’ve visited some of the oldest ruins in Europe and they don’t feel half as ancient as your village” (HRK 55). He also compares its antiquity to that of Egypt: “[T]he last plague of frogs I ever heard about was in Egypt.’ This reinforced the feeling of antiquity the place had given me from the very first” (59). He likes to believe that the place is beyond geography and history: “And I’m still not convinced that I didn’t penetrate beyond geography. Not that I care too much about geography; it’s one of those bossy ideas according to which, if you locate a place, there’s nothing more to be said about it” (HRK 55). By locating Africa beyond geography and history, Henderson enhances his civilized image and highlights the Africans’ savageness. Spurr believes: “The discourse of negation denies the history as well as place, constituting the past as absence, but also designating that absence as a negative presence: a people without history is one which exists only in a negative sense; like the bare earth, can be transformed by history, but they cannot make history their own” (98).
Anbar 21 The fact that Bellow’s African land is given no name deepens the sense of fantasy about the place and allows Bellow to legitimize his colonial fantasy. Said rationalizes: “For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away” (55). This fact accounts for Bellow’s reliance on imaginative geography. It helps him fantasize Africa and its people. Thus imaginative geography is a projection of his fantasy of Africa which might involve misrepresentation. This fantasy about the place being beyond geography and history significantly saves Henderson from any skeptical and polemical notes against his reproduction of Africa and its people. Ellen Pifer assumes that “beyond history and geography,” (101) is a mechanism of salvation. Here, it liberates Henderson from his fear of death. I also believe that Henderson’s journey to a place beyond history and geography is a kind of liberation from the restrains of conventional time and space. Henderson’s Africa does not abide by rules. His journey is thus an escape from rationality. In short, by placing Africa beyond history and geography, Bellow places Henderson in a free zone thus allowing him the liberty to flaunt his superior ontological position and use the African as a medium for his colonial desire. Henderson’s imperial response to Africa extends from place to climate. His surveillance of the African weather reinforces indirectly his American ethnicity. Although Henderson does not refer to the American weather, his contradictory feelings towards the African weather show that he is unconsciously comparing between it and the African weather. Henderson initially praises the hot weather of Africa: “To begin with, the heat was just what I craved. Much hotter than the Gulf of Mexico . . .” (HRK 43). He, however, refers later on to the place as a “baking heat” (HRK 47). Henderson’s craving for heat in the first quote contradicts with his description of it as “baking” in the second quote. This contradiction creates an ambivalence that confuses the readers about his feelings towards the matter. The ambivalence exposes his attachment to his American ethnicity
Anbar 22 and helps mask the colonialist ideology in the text. Henderson wants to underline Africa as a tropical place in comparison to America. Going into the interiors of Africa allows Henderson to reflect on some of the Africans’ human habitations and rituals. Surveillance of these habitations helps intensify, on the one hand, the African’s savagery and strangeness and, on the other hand, Henderson’s own American civilization and sense of superiority. His knowledge of the details of African life depicts him as the all-knowing which is a colonizer’s practice that implicates power. Henderson’s surveillance of the Africans’ human habitations provides him with a feeling of power over the place and its inhabitants, “. . . it was within a courtyard and, like all the rest of the houses, round, made of clay, and with a conical roof. All inside seemed very brittle and light and empty. Smoke-browned poles were laid across the ceiling at the intervals of about three feet and beyond them the long ribs of the palm leaves resembled whalebone” (HRK 62). The wrestling tradition of the Arnewi gives Henderson a chance to demonstrate his physical hegemony over the Africans. Though he allegedly shows resistance to the engagement, he ultimately triumphs in his physical powers and his ability to conquer his opponent. This hegemony implies that the “Other” can be mastered and contained. The incident represents the sore conflict between the savage/civilized and relation of master/slave: “Don’t, Prince. Don’t do that. I think I have the weight advantage on you.” All the while I was trying—trying, trying to classify the [wrestling] event. . . . But in manto-man combat I am pretty ugly to tangle with. . . . “So let’s not fight. We’re too high,” I said, “on the scale of civilization—we should be giving all our energy to the question of the frogs instead.” (HRK 65) Henderson appeals to civilization as an excuse to escape the wrestling game when he in fact considers it an act of war because he calls in his “murder technique” (HRK 66). Obliquely, Henderson accuses the king of being underdeveloped because he insists on wrestling. In contrast, he polishes his image as a white man from a superseding culture. He ridicules the Arnewis’
Anbar 23 customs and their involvement in matters that in his eyes are not as important as the contamination of their water source. He is driven by his American sense of superiority. America’s political and economic hegemonic role in the world shapes Bellow’s ethnicity and his colonialist ideology of the Africans. He wants to control their course of life by altering their traditions. Henderson’s American hegemony manifests itself in his desire to lead, to stand for freedom, civilization and order among these African tribes. This feeling of his American hegemony will help him resolve his cultural crisis. Despite Henderson’s pretentious desire to avoid the wrestling game, he is elated by his winning: “The news of my victory was given out as we left the hut by the dust on Itelo’s head and by his manner in walking beside me, so that the people applauded as I came into sunshine, pulling on my T-shirt and setting the helmet back into place” (HRK 71). His rationalization of victory is imperialistically loud: “But I tried to deprecate the whole thing and said to him: ‘I have experience on my side. You’ll never know how much and what kind’” (HRK 70). It is a typical colonialist act where the colonizer claims experience, knowledge and civilization as factors that qualify him to supersede the colonized. He brings in incidents that show how the Africans are underdeveloped in comparison to him as he comes from the “great outside” reinforcing thus the binary opposition of the civilized/savage: By now she understood that the coat was waterproof, so she called over one of the long-necked wives and had her spit on the material and rub in the spittle, then feel inside. She was astonished and told everybody, wetting her finger and laying it against her arm, and again they started to chant, “Ahow,” and whistle on the fingers and flap their hands, and Willatale embraced me again. (HRK 77) He shows how the Africans are amazed and grateful at his simple gift as they receive the waterproof raincoat with awesome appreciation. Bellow manipulates Matlba’s admiration of Henderson to reinforce his colonialist superiority concept. Itelo praises him: “Oh, she have a strong affection for you. Don’t you see she is the most beautiful woman and you the strongest of
Anbar 24 strong men. You have won her heart” (sic) (HRK 80). Henderson arrogantly responds: “Hell with her heart” (HRK 80), which is a further enforcement of a supercilious attitude. Henderson, however, penetrates into the Africans’ traditions and customs to discredit them: “Several young women were gliding the horns of cattle and painting and ornamenting one another too, putting on ostrich feathers, vulture feathers, and ornaments. Some of the men wore human jaw bones as neckpieces under their chins” (HRK 146). The Africans are portrayed as savage using “human jaw bones” and “vulture feathers” as ornaments. He penetrates into their traditions not to appreciate their culture but to indicate their wildness. His gaze captures many other minute details in an act of mastery to show off his knowledge and civilization. Henderson, in addition, practices surveillance of people. He highlights the wild environment of Africa to de-civilize its people. He wants to prepare the readers to accept their image as “wild savages” (HRK 167). On his arrival at the Arnewi’s village, the first African tribe he encounters, he uses his controlling gaze to establish knowledge of the Africans: In front of them all was a young woman, a girl not much older, I believe, than my daughter Ricey. As soon as she saw me she burst into loud tears. I would never have expected this to wound me as it did. . . . Confronted with this weeping girl I was by this time ready to start bawling myself, thinking of Lily and the children and my father and the violin and the foundling and all the sorrow of my life. . . . Behind the weeping girl other natives were crying along softly. . . . Thus this sturdy, virginal girl was crying—simply crying—without gestures; her arms were meekly hanging by her sides and all the facts (speaking physically) were shown to the world. The tears fell from her wide cheekbones onto her breasts. . . . Everyone, however, went on crying . . . the rest went not done mourning and covered their faces with their hands while their naked bodies shook. (HRK 48-50) The impression this image leaves on the reader is that the Africans are powerless and miserable people. They are denied the right to speak or express themselves in speech, “simply crying,”
Anbar 25 whereas Henderson is given power and right to analyze and see through them. His surveillance, although denigrates Africa and its people, helps him have a better conception of himself and thus to reconstruct his identify. Crying as a form of helpless self-expression repeats itself in his comment on their relationship with their cattle. He tells how the Arnewi are passionately attached to their cattle: “You understand, the Arnewi are milk-drinkers exclusively and the cows are their entire livelihood; they never eat meat except ceremonially whenever a cow meets a natural death, and even they consider this a form of cannibalism and they eat in tears” (HRK 61). To distance himself, Henderson interestingly plays on the element of difference by highlighting the strangeness of the Africans’ tradition. This idea reminds him not to lose his sense of their difference because it will deliver him to self-recognition. His commanding gaze becomes offensive when he finds it hard to appreciate their compassion towards their cattle: Coming to a corral, we saw a fellow with a big clumsy comb of wood standing over a cow—a humped cow like all the rest, but that’s not the point; the point is that he was grooming and petting her in a manner I never saw before. With the comb, he was doing her forelock, which was thick over the bulge of the horns. He stroked and hugged her, and she was not well . . . you have to understand that these people love their cattle like brothers and sisters, like children; they have fifty terms just to describe the various shapes of the horns, and Itelo explained to me that there were hundreds of words for the facial expressions of cattle and a whole language of cow behavior. To a limited extent I could appreciate this. (HRK 56) Controlled by his American sophisticated background, Henderson animalizes the Africans because of their attachment to their cows. Animalizing them is part of his colonizing process to practice his hegemony over them. It is also part of the resolution of his American crisis. The difficulty to “appreciate” this bond between the Africans and their cows reflects his contempt of their primitive position and aims at enhancing his civilized culture.
Anbar 26 Henderson’s surveillance becomes more specific, focusing on the Africans’ physical aspects. The African body especially that of the female provides fascinated musing for Henderson: he is simultaneously entranced and repulsed by their sexuality and biological features. His commanding view of their bodies reflects their secondary racial ontology to him. Bhaba theorizes: “The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference—racial and sexual” (96). Henderson uses sexism as well as racism in relation to body as a discriminatory factor to construct the colonized “Other.” His surveillance of bodies emphasizes the primitive nature of the Africans: “[W]e were met by a party of naked people” (48). He objectifies Mtalba, the Arnewi queen’s sister, but then adds charm to that: “She is built like Mount Everest but has a lot of delicacy” (HRK 97). This opposition creates ambivalence about the colonialist nature of the text. Henderson’s surveillance of people galvanizes him into an act of eroticizing their bodies. There is an essential relationship between the study of the “Other” and the concurrent “eroticization” of that “Other.” Spurr’s concept of eroticization of the colonized, “refers to a set of rhetorical instances—metaphors, seductive fantasy, expression of sexual anxiety— in which the tradition of colonialist and phallocentric discourse coincide” (170). Eroticization of the African female body coincides with Henderson’s sexual fascination with that body. Henderson’s interest in the sexuality of the Africans is inspired by Bellow’s practice of Reichianism in 1951. Reichian therapy encourages “free flow of sexuality” as the key to health (Atlas 162). It is a source of emotional release. It is another evidence of Bellow’s presence in the text. Eroticization assumes a colonial desire that is reductive in its essence. The native women are subjected to an open racial evaluation. Henderson’s erotic fantasy and attraction to their sexuality mask his disparagement of the African’s habits. For example, Henderson eroticizes the queen of Arnewi’s welcome of him: Itelo indicated that I should give the old woman a hand, and was astonished when she took it and buried it between her breasts. This is normal form of greeting here—
Anbar 27 Itelo had put my hand against his breast—but from a woman I didn’t anticipate the same. On the top of everything else, I mean the radiant heat and monumental weight which my hand received, there was the calm pulsation of her heart participating in the introduction. This was as regular as the rotation of the earth, and it was a surprise to me; my mouth came open and my eyes grew fixed as if I were touching the secrets of life; but I couldn’t keep my hand there forever and I came to myself and drew it out. (HRK 71-2) Henderson’s comic reaction to his physical contact with the queen masks his enchantment by their sexuality. He uses comedy to hide his strong fascination with African African women’s sexuality. sexualit y. Comedy is an attempt to cover his sexual excitement. African women’s obesity is a mark of sexual beauty in parts of Africa. Henderson recognizes the tradition but comically critiques it to hide his fascination with their sexuality: Mtabla was so heavy that her skin had turned pink from expansion. Women are bred like that in parts of Africa where you have to be obese to be considered a real beauty. She was all guised up, for at such a weight a woman can’t go without the support of clothes. . . . [S]he shone and sparkled with fat and moisture and her flesh was puckered or flowered like a regular brocade. At the hips under the flowing gown she was as broad as a sofa, and she took my hand and placed it on her breast, saying, “Mtalba. “Mtalba. Mtalba awhonto.” I am Mtalba admires you. (HRK 74) Mtabla is both obese and slothful. An identical situation occurs when Henderson’s face is forced to sink into queen Willatale’s belly: Itelo protruded his lips to show that I was expected to kiss her on the belly. To dry my mouth first, I swallowed. The fall I had taken while wrestling had split my underlip. Then I kissed, giving a shiver at the heat I encountered. The knot of the lion’s skin was pushed aside by my face, which sank inward. I was aware of the old
Anbar 28 lady’s navel and her internal organs as they made sounds of submergence. I felt as though I were riding in a balloon above the Spice Islands, soaring in hot clouds while exotic odors arose from below. (HRK 74) Bellow juxtaposes eroticization and comedy in this intimate situation in order to mask Henderson’s attraction to African woman’s sexuality. Henderson’s instinctual sexual arousal is made comic by the sound of the queen’s bowls moving. Later on, comedy turns to denigration when he assigns to her negative qualities such as “heavy” and “colossal thighs and hips,” (HRK 98). The situation implicates three aspects: eroticization, comedy and denigration. Henderson seems overly concerned with the issue of obesity as he uses different ways to put emphasis on it. These emphases on obesity not only distract the readers’ attention away from his libidinous obsession with African women, they also send a message that obesity is quintessential among inactive and underdeveloped people, namely, the Africans. Obesity demeans the Africans presenting them luxurious in a negative sense and slothful manner. Henderson’s sexual discourse on African women combines two contradictory impulses; sexual attraction and sexual repulsion. His repulsion is another form of denial of the excitement he felt. Repulsion is instigated by Henderson’s consciousness consciousnes s of his own American racial superiority that causes him to designate such a mechanism of repulsion to deny his own attraction and negate the factors which attract him. Hendersons’ eroticization of the African women becomes more intense with the second tribe, the Wariri. Wariri. He becomes more confident of his colonialist mastery. Spurr regards this knowledge as the ultimate knowledge: “[T]he African woman is a text to be opened and closed at will, and whose contents allow entry into the mysteries of African language; that this language, and by extension African culture, is itself both contained within and revealed by the female body; that sexual knowledge of her body is knowledge of Africa itself” (171). Spurr’s theory is illuminating when applied to Bellow’s text. It exposes his racial ideology about the African females whom he sees as freely open to his observation and assessment.
Anbar 29 Henderson’s ethnographic imagination which sexualizes the Africans is evident in sexual images associated with female’s nudity and physical strength. Actually, Henderson never let nudity pass by without highlighting it, “naked thighs,” (HRK 176) “at this gathering of naked women” (HRK 255). It is his way to construct his systematic negation of the “Other”: Before I saw Dahfu himself, I was aware of numbers of women—twenty or thirty was my first estimate—and the destiny of naked women, their volupté (only a French word would do the job here), pressed upon me from all sides. The heat was great and the predominant odor was feminine. The only thing I could compare it to in temperature and closeness was a hatchery—the low ceiling also is responsible for this association. (HRK 153) In comparing the women to chickens in a hatchery, he dehumanizes them once again, reducing them to breeders. Paradoxically, Paradoxicall y, he favorably comments on their physical strength, “[p]hysical capacity always stirs me, especially in women” (HRK 165). Male chauvinistically, he admires their fanning of the king and carrying him over their shoulders. Henderson presents an erotic subservient image of Dahfu’s wives; not only that they are nude but also that they “attended to [Dahfu’s] every need” and “they dried [Dahfu’s] sweat and massaged the muscles of his great legs and his panting belly, loosening the golden drawstring of his purple trousers. I wished to tell him how great he had been. I was dying to say what I felt” (HRK 175). He exploits the Harem world world to valorize a reprehensible sexual image of the Africans, “the different members of harem, most of them so soft, supple, and black” (HRK 160). He portrays them as libidinal. However, their sexual charm is a threat to Henderson. There seems to be something about the togetherness of the females in the king’s harem world that erotically charms yet frightens him at the same. Their unity and sexual power contradict his view of them as miserable and helpless. Hiding his fear, he highlights them as sluggish:
Anbar 30 His big tufted couch was empty, but the wives lay on their cushions and mats gossiping and combing their hair and trimming their fingernails and toes. The atmosphere was very social and talkative. Most of the women lay resting, and their form of relaxation was peculiar; they folded their legs as we might our arms and lay back, perfectly boneless. Amazing. I stared at them. The odor of the room was tropical, like certain parts of the botanical garden, or like charcoal fumes and honey, like hot buckwheat. (HRK 206) The conjunction of sexuality and slothfulness suggests some attraction to women’s sexual power. Henderson, thus, appeals to slothfulness to lessen his fear of their sexual power over him. Henderson’ discourse on African women’s dancing is an erotic experience that reflects his colonial fantasy: “As she sprung dancing, her breasts were fixed, as if really made of gold, and because of her length and thinness, when she leaped it was something supernatural, like a giant locust” (HRK 175). He draws a graceful erotic image of this dancer yet he critiques her selfdestructive inclination: Mupi, trying out the music, swayed two or three times, then raised her leg stiffkneed, and when her foot returned slowly to the ground it seemed to be searching for something. And then she began to rock and continued groping with alternate feet and closed her eyes. The thin beaten gold shells like hollow walnuts, rustled on this Mupi’s body. She took the king’s pipe from his hand and knocked out the coals on her thigh, pressing down with her hand, and while she burned herself her eyes, which were fluid with the pain, never stopped looking into his. (HRK 255) Eroticization discourse depicts the African as lesser human beings and presents a counter image of Henderson’s civilized being. Fantasy and the sexual factor are part of Bellow’s eroticization process. He portrays the African females as libidinal:
Anbar 31 His ladies! I thought, and looked about me at this gathering of naked women. For after he had told me that he would be strangled when he couldn’t be of any further services to them, I took kind of a dim view of them. . . . Their hips and breasts suited their bodies better than any costume could have done. . . . They were painted and ornamented and perfumed with a musk that smelled a little like sweet coal oil . . . and the dancers wore colored scarves which waved flimsily from their shoulders as they sprinted with elegant long legs across the court and basic scratching of the music went on as the old fellow pushed his bow, rasp, rasp, rasp. (HRK 255) The stereotyping discourse of the African females’ sexuality is applied to their king. Henderson’s represents the Wariri king, Dhafu, as equally libidinal and lazy: He put on a generous large-brimmed hat of the same purple color as his drawers, but in velvet. Human teeth, to protect him from the evil eye, were sewed to the crown. He arose from his green sofa but only to lie down again in a hammock. Amazons dressed in their short leather waistcoats were the bearers. Four on either side put their shoulders to the poles, and these shoulders, although they were amazons, were soft. (HRK 165) He repeatedly highlights these characteristics of the king: “And even seated on the backless leather chair he was still, as on the sofa or in the hammock, sumptuously at rest” (HRK 207). The king himself confesses: “The less motion I expend, and the more I repose myself, the easier it is for me to attend my duties. All my duties. Including also the prerogatives of these many wives. You may not think so on first glance, but it is a most complex existence requiring that I husband myself’” (HRK 155). It is so resonant with the vivid imaginative description of King Dahfu as a Sultan: He wore his wide velvet hat with a fringe of human teeth and occupied a cushioned seat, surrounded by wives who kept drying his face with little squares of colored silk. They lit his pipe and handed him drinks, making sure that he was screened by a
Anbar 32 brocaded cloth whenever he took a sip. Beside one of the range tree an old fellow was playing a stringed instrument. (HRK 254) When Bellow shows them as libidinal, he wishes to highlight his sense of their moral inferiority. This action is intended to increase by contrast his protagonist’s moral superiority. Picturing the ruling figure in the country as libidinal and slothful supports Bellow’s discourse of debasement. According to the civilized white man’s values, libido and slothfulness are negative characteristics that imply animalism and primitivism. This negative image reflects Bellow’s strong sense of his American ethnocentrism which is manifest in Henderson being different from the Africans. Henderson reluctantly becomes a part of the erotic fantasy of the Harem when becoming the Wariri rain king: “Then the women, whom I had ordered out, came back with some articles of clothing which Romilayu said were the Sungo’s, or rain king’s outfit” (HRK 204). His involvement, however, does not mean that he is embracing their culture. On the contrary, he is repulsed by its practices: “So then my program, minus one factor: Every morning the two amazons, Tamba and Bebu, waited on me and offered me a joxi, or trample massage. Never failing to be surprised and disappointed at my refusal they took the treatment themselves; they administrated to each other” (HRK 239). Henderson’s refusal to undergo massage displays his contempt of the Africans’ culture. His contempt indicates the superiority of his American culture. Bellow operates the rhetorical mode of “debasement” when his protagonist classifies the Africans and assigns characteristics to them. “Classification” overlaps with the rhetorical mode of “debasement.” Henderson subversively highlights the Africans’ blackness, negritude, primitivism, savagery, sluggishness, inability to govern themselves and problem in sanitation. Spurr enlists the last two aspects as qualities assigned to the individual savage in the rhetorical mode of debasement (76). Debasement is a clear “othering” process that negates the identities of the Africans on a racial basis. The Africans are viewed in light of a biological and social determinism. The physical debasement is present in the color of the skin as a signifier of difference and inferiority.
Anbar 33 Significantly, it sustains the concept of the white man’s superiority. Henderson’s fantasy about blackness should not cripple the readers from identifying the element of racial inequality emphasized by his manipulation of the color: “His black skin shone as if with the moisture that gathers on plants when they reach their prime” (HRK 214). He racially stereotypes the blackness of the Africans when he represents them, yet Bhabha denies the simplification of the matter and consider it, “a false representation of a given reality” (107). I agree with Bhabha’s contention that such a false representation is a distortion of reality because contrapuntally Bellow subtly manipulates the reality of their blackness to indicate the difference between him and them. It is better to call Bellow’s representation a representation of codified facts that serves his colonialist intentions. Henderson applies to the African natives degenerating terms and ethnic labels that have disturbing racial implications. The discourse of binary opposition white/black is a strong “othering” factor. MSC Okolo observes: Words associated with the black man in the colonial language reveal and confirm an ideological bias against him and the place he occupies in the structural relationship existing in society; to continue to accept colonial definitions that debase the black man is an affirmation, even if disguised, of the continuance of colonialism with its bifurcation of the world into superior “civilized” beings and inferior “primitive” sub-humans. . . . (3-4) In the following scene, Henderson highlights the African’s inferiority to the colonizer. The Africans become objects of spectacle for him: And now I began to observe the coloring of these people was very original and the dark was more deeply burnt in about the eyes whereas the palms of their hands were the color of freshly washed granite. As if, you know, they had played catch with the light and some of it had come off. Those peculiarities of color were altogether new to me. . . Just then I deeply felt my physical discrepancies. My face is like some sort
Anbar 34 of terminal; it’s like Grand Central, I mean—the big horse nose and the wide mouth that opens into the nostrils, and eyes like tunnels. So I stood there waiting, surrounded by this black humanity in the aromatic dust, with that inanimate brilliance coming off the thatch of the huts nearby. (HRK 51) Henderson is chromatic. Stereotypical distinction between people on the basis of color is called chromatism in the postcolonial field (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Studies 37). Henderson makes it clear that the blackness of the Africans’ skin reminds him of the differences between the African race and the white American. His attitude shows the white man’s desire to be privileged by his color. Henderson’s reservation of this privilege reduces blackness to stereotype. He never allows himself to forget the “physical discrepancies” between himself and the Africans by constantly referring to them as “black.” Indirectly, he reminds himself and the readers of himself as a white man. Racial blackness evinces in many other incidents in this novel. He portrays a nameless Wariri as: “Our black man not only wore a leather apron but seemed leathery all over, and if he had wings those would have been of leather, too. His features were pressed deep into his face, which was small, secret, and, even in the direct rays of the red sun, very black” (HRK 116). Teun Van Dijk theorizes: “[T]o avoid naming people is one of the moves in a strategy of ethnic distancing” (171). Henderson feels that it is not enough to say that the African man is black but there is a compelling need to emphasize blackness “very black.” He re-appropriates vocabulary to function as racial vocabulary. In another place he says “darker” (HRK 118). Although he is present in a pure community of Africans, he ridiculously reaffirms their darkness: “From the basic blackness of the flesh of the tribe” (HRK 173), “[t]he black-leather angel fellow” (HRK 195), “[o]f course the king’s extreme blackness of color made him fabulously strange to me” (HRK 207). The phrase “[t]he black-leather angel fellow” is also repeated on pages 248, 251 and 257. These recurrent images indicate that Henderson recalls subconsciously his white American community. This dark depiction results in a stereotyping of the blackness of the African race, “Boy, they’re the children of darkness” (HRK 136).
Anbar 35 Bellow’s delineation of blackness extends to more specific features of blackness. He intensifies his despising of the Africans’ black color by emphasizing their negritude features, thus discounting its significance to them. Léopold Sédar Senghor considers that “Negritude is nothing more or less than what some English speaking Africans have called the African personality” (27). In his words, negritude stands for the African personality. It is some kind of definition of the African man. This in turn makes it part of the African identity. Thus, when Bellow devalues negritude’s significance, he deconstructs the African man’s identity. The inferiority of skin color is equated with the inferiority of identity. Henderson deepens the readers’ sense of the African’s physical discrepancies by cunningly highlighting their negritude’s characteristics. His way highlights the white master’s color primacy. Henderson characterizes Romilayu as follows: He was in his late thirties, he told me, but looked much older because of premature wrinkles. His skin did not fit tightly. This happens to many black men of certain breeds and they say it has something to do with the distribution of the fat on the body. He had a bush of dust hair which he tried sometimes, but vainly, to smooth flat. It was unbrushable and spread out at the sides of his heads like a dwarf pine. (HRK 45) Romilayu is constituted as an object of spectacle and is necessarily read as an “Other.” Because of his race, Romilayu’s skin is flabby and has wrinkles. The wild nature of his hair makes his head look strange. The white man’s condescending attitude and sense of superiority show in the emphasis on the biological difference of the “Other.” Henderson blatantly uses the word “negro” as an elimination of individuality: “Tall Negro cowherds came up to us with their greased curls and their deep lips. I had never seen men who looked so wild and I said to Romilayu, my guide, ‘This isn’t the place you promised to bring me to, is it?’” (HRK 44). This paragraph significantly reveals the importance of the Africans’ biological peculiarity to Henderson. The negritude discourse reminds him of the difference between himself as a white man and them as black. This biological
Anbar 36 difference is crucial to his self-recognition and identification. He needs to stress the African African biological difference to affirm his white identity. Henderson’s obsession with negritude discourse permeates the novel and, more importantly, functions as a degenerate race mechanism. He employs language as a weapon of stigmatization. He describes Horko, the king’s uncle saying: “[h]is hair grew tight and small, peppercorn style, in tiny droplike curls” (HRK 147). The king’s negritude features are recursively highlighted in Henderson the Rain King: “His lips were large and tumid, the most negroid features of his face” (154), “his pink swelling mouth” (168), and “[h]is large, swelled lips were more red than was the case with others of his tribe. Consequently his mouth was more visible than mouths usually are” (184), and “his high swelled lips” (255). The repetition of ethnic identifiers functions as an “othering” mechanism. Bellow’s concern with negritude postulates a strategic essentialism. He employs essential characteristics to distinguish the Africans from other races. Stereotypical employment of essentialist ideas is part of his colonization process. Bellow seems to be negrophobe. Henderson’s debasement of the Africans implicates their lifestyle as savage and them as uncivilized and sluggish people. He seems to like the idea that the Africans are underdeveloped and far removed from civilization. His anxiety at the idea operates the binary opposition of center/periphery. center/peripher y. He becomes frustrated at discovering that Itelo, king of the Arnewi, has gone to a civilized part of the world and speaks English: I don’t know why I should have been surprised—disappointed is the word. It’s the great imperial language of today, taking its turn after Greek and Latin and so on . . . but when this fellow, built like a champion, in his white drooping cloth and his scarf and middy, addressed me in English, I was both shaken up and grieved. (HRK 52) The imperialist dream of Henderson to conquer those people seems to collapse. Itelo’s response to Henderson’s disappointment on knowing that he is a learned man is: “I am very sorry. We are discovered” (HRK 53). Henderson cannot digest the idea that the tribe has been exposed to
Anbar 37 civilization. He questions the king sarcastically: “I see you have been out in the world anyway Or Or is English everybody’s second language here” (HRK 54). He, nevertheless, does not allow the thought that they might be civilized to prevail. He attempts to ignore facts and sustain his prenotion of them as uncivilized. Thinking of what to tell the queen, he ponders: “Should I tell her that I was a rich man from America? Maybe she didn’t even know where America was” (HRK 76). He has difficulty admitting that the Arnewi might be civilized in some way: “I figured that these Arnewi, no exception to the rules, had developed unevenly; they might have the wisdom of life, but when it came to frogs they were helpless” (HRK 87). Henderson’s classification classificatio n of them as weak empowers him over them. It gives him the right to practice colonial hegemony in a way that enhances his perception of himself. The natives are used as a mediator of the colonizer’s desire. They are a medium for the colonizer’s self-recognition. Henderson’s formation of identity and discovering of self necessitates disempowering the Africans as well as racial debasement of them. The rough nature of the Wariri who are described as “the children of darkness” is employed to debase their black racial ontology. In spite of the Africans’ toughness and energy, their presumably small size provokes Henderson’s colonial mode: These men were smaller, darker, and shorter than the Arnewi but very tough. They wore gaudy loincloths and marched energetically and after we had gone on for an hour or more I was less merry at heart than before. I began to feel atrocious toward those fellows, and for a small inducement I would have swept them in my arms, the whole dozen or so of them, and run them over the cliff. (HRK 118) Even when initially impressed with their toughness, Henderson makes sure to highlight their tiny stature to disempower them. His hegemonic propensities soon dominate and he blindly, unjustifiably expresses a wish to demolish them altogether. He later refers to the Warriri as “savage” and elaborate on this aspect saying, “I was among savages and that I had been quartered with a corpse and had seen guys hanging upside down by the feet . . .” (HRK 161). The frequent use of the word “savage” “savage” is clearly discriminatory because it
Anbar 38 augments the sense of Africans’ cannibalism. His insistence on reminding himself constantly of the differences between the Warriri and himself allows the emergence of the savage/civilized dichotomy. The dichotomy is essential to his self-identification. self-identificatio n. Bellow fantasizes a ritual preceding the rain ceremony in a way that depicts the Africans, especially king Dahfu, as subhuman because he sits before a bowl containing two skulls that “had ribbons tied through the eyes sockets, very long and gleaming, of a dark blue color” (HRK 170). Interestingly, Henderson remarks that one of the skulls belongs to Dahfu’s deceased father. He cannot hide his disgust at this ritual: “And you saw yesterday what savagery can be if you never saw it before, throwing passes with his own father’s skull” (HRK 210). This remark intensifies the binary opposition of savage/civilized. Boehmer relates the image of the African savage to the concept of social evolution: “The imagery of the African continent as savage and degraded, a heart of darkness, therefore, predated Social Darwinist ideas regarding the differential development of cultures” (83). It is an instrument of segregation. Henderson talks about the effect of the Wariri’s barbarism on him: “I was beginning to feel the spirit of the occasion―pervaded by barbaric emotions―the scratchiness in my bosom was greatly aggravated” (HRK 171). He mingles erotic dancing with fantasy to underscore the Africans’ savageness. He uses the image of the gentian and polyps to fantasize the savage image of the skulls: Around them and over them the king and this gilded woman began to play a game with the two skulls. Whirling them by the long ribbons, each took a short run and threw them high in the air, above the figures of wood which stood under the tarpaulins―the biggest of these idols about as tall as an old upright Steinway piano. The two skulls flew up high, and then the king and the girl each made the catch. . . . The women threw her skull. The thick purple and blue ribbons made it look like a flower in the air. I swear before God, it appeared just like a gentian. In midair it passed the skull coming from the hand of the king. Both came down streaming
Anbar 39 down with the blue satin ribbons following, as though they were a couple of ocean polyps. (HRK 174) In spite of the supposed beautiful image of the gentian and polyps flowers depicted in the above passage, the use of skull of the deceased father and connection of the gentian and polyps to cancer destroy that beautiful image. This image shows Africa as place of sickness and death. This scene increases the readers’ sense of the Africans’ savagery. The overtones of the colonial discourse are evident in the narrator’s recursive description of the brutality of the Africans. There exist numerous examples in Henderson the Rain King: “[O]lder people were particularly abusive and waspish” (146), “bodies hanging upside down. Through a peculiarity of the light they were small, like dolls” (150), “a drink made of milk mixed with the fresh blood of cattle” (151), “Deep bloody cuts were being made meanwhile on the chest that belonged to this face. A green old knife―a cruel clutch” (172), “they were wild savages,” (176) “The savagery and stridency of these Africans” (192), and “[b]etween us in a large wooden bowl lay a couple of human skulls, tilted cheek to cheek” (154). All these instances provide evidence that Bellow is determined to have the Africans perceived as racialized “Others.” The colonizer’s self-idealization and mental conceit materializes in the rhetorical mode of “affirmation.” Spurr believes: “This rhetoric is deployed on behalf of a collective subjectivity which idealizes itself variously in the name of civilization, humanity, science, progress, etc, so that the repeated affirmation of such values becomes in itself a means of gaining power and mastery” (110). Affirmation is a desire to exercise power. Henderson proclaims himself the champion and the savior of the Africans. This attitude is an idealization of his American ethnicity. He boasts superiorly his mental capability in solving problems and physical strength during difficult situations as will be seen below. He is keen on idealizing his image as a benevolent, good man in his own eyes as well as in the Africans’. His self-idealization solicits affirmation through the “Other.” Shamelessly, Henderson declares himself the “intruding stranger” (HRK 195). Henderson’s Americanism, indeed, shapes his dictatorship. Pronouncing himself an “intruding stranger” unveils
Anbar 40 his interior motives for going to Africa and works to condemn him. The fact that he is a stranger distances him from the Africans but since he needs them to build his identity and self-knowledge, his intrusion and negation of them are necessary for overcoming his cultural crisis. He represents them as dependent entities who are incapable of self-government. His act of negating them is his path for self-identification. Oddly enough, Henderson’s invasive attitude seems parallel to the actions of superpower administrations or politicians today. Both, they and Henderson, follow a subversive strategy based on presumed innocence and what is professed as good intention. Simultaneously, this attitude denies the subjects their autonomy. Henderson acts as an expert and savior but when things go wrong, he blames others for not orienting him in the matter beforehand. He chides Romilayu because he fails to tell him that the king speaks English, “. . . as he spoke English, and I had been boasting, ‘Show me your enemies and I’ll kill them. Where is the man-eater, lead me to him’ . . . I felt extremely ridiculous, and I gave Romilayu a dark, angry look, as though it were his fault for not having briefed me properly” (HRK 53). He gets unreasonably angry because he expressed himself like an idiot in English when he thinks that the Africans know no English. He seeks to win the admiration of African children. He thinks how to amuse the Arnewi’s children with a fire show to display his power: “Aren’t they something?” I said to Romilayu. “Christ, look at the little pots on them, and those tight curls. . . . I certainly wish I had a treat for them, but I have not got anything. How do you think they’d like it if a I set fire to a bush with this lighter?” and without waiting for Romilayu’s advice I took out the Austrian lighter with the drooping wick, spun the tiny wheel with my thumb, and immediately a bush went flaming, almost invisible in the strong sunlight. It roared; it made a brilliant manifestation; it stretched to its limits and became extinct in the sand. . . . [T]he kids were unanimously silent. . . .“How do you think that went over?” I asked Romilayu. “I meant well.” (HRK 48)
Anbar 41 Narcissistically, he seeks appreciation for the fire show he performs. He rationalizes to Romilayu that his intentions are good. Henderson’s good intentions increase and his desire to impress the Arnewi intensifies when he learns of the contamination of their cistern. The sanitary position is created by the author to demean the natives. On seeing a girl weeping over the loss of her cattle, he imagines that she appeals to him for help: “The poor soul is in trouble? Is there something I can do for her? She’s coming to me for help. I feel it” (HRK 50). Henderson’s sympathy is solipsistic not genuine. He fantasizes that confessing to strangers is an African custom: “Anyway, as we were strangers they were obliged to come forward and confess everything to us, and ask whether we knew the reason for their trouble” (HRK 51), in order to legitimatize intervention. He sees himself as a benign savior who has come to mend all the native tribulations. He is convinced that he knows more about anything than the natives do. His fantasy feeds the colonial relationship and shows the superiority of his culture. Henderson feels obliged to intervene: “I said to Romilayu, ‘So ask them what they want me to do. I intend to do something, and I really meant it’” (HRK 51). Henderson’s intervention is integral to his self-affirmation. Although he sounds apologetic for intervening, it is all an allegation because he is determined to do something: “I don’t want to bust into your customs. But it’s hard to see all this going on and not even to make a suggestion. Can I have a look at your water supply at least” (HRK 57). He will civilize the natives whether they like it or not because he believes he knows what they need. Spurr explains this colonialist behavior: [B]ut even when the western writer declares sympathy with the colonized, the condition which makes the writer’s work possible requires a commanding, controlling gaze. The sympathetic humanitarian eye is no less a product of deeply held colonialist values, and no less authoritative in the mastery of its object, than the surveying and policing eye. (20)
Anbar 42 He asserts that the colonizer’s sympathy is not genuine because it springs from his sense of mastery and colonialist ideals. This hygiene problem postulates difference and creates a binary opposition of civilized/savage. It functions as a justification for Henderson’s colonialist intervention as well as a de-civilizing methodology. Henderson is determined to intervene. His determination to relieve the Arnewi from their suffering becomes imperially imperative: “A man of about fifty, white-haired, was kneeling, weeping and shuddering, throwing dust on his head, because his cow was passing away . . . at this I myself was swayed; I felt compassion, and I said, ‘Prince, for Christ’s sake, can’t anything be done’” (HRK 56). He first feels sad then the compassion of the colonizer to do goodness stirs up. He impulsively suggests ways to get rid of the frogs: “[W]e could filter them out. We could poison them. There are a hundreds things we could do” (HRK 59). This action is essential to his identity formation. He reasons out his impetus to Prince Itelo: “Look here, I’m kind of an irrational person myself, but survival is survival” (HRK 59). It is a very imperialistic logic that he uses. Henderson’s dishonorable way to achieve identity materializes in his claim to help the Arnewi when he is really doing that to overcome his crisis of identity. Henderson exploits the poisoned cistern event to enhance his fine self image as a colonizer: “I realized that I would never rest until I had dealt with these creatures and lifted the plague” (HRK 61). He falls in love with the idea of himself as “their great benefactor” (HRK 61). His sense of obligation towards the Africans resembles superpower countries with their policy and sense of obligation to intervene in the affairs of other nations. Henderson speaks with pride about his ability to purify their source of water. It is an imaginary colonial ability. As readers, we are not informed at any stage that Henderson has the experience or the appropriate knowledge to handle such a situation. He contemplates the matter seriously: “Meanwhile my heart was all stirred and I swore to myself every other minute that I would do something, I would make a contribution here. ‘I hope I may die,’ I said to myself, ‘if I don’t drive out, exterminate, and crush those frogs’” (HRK 73). The challenge is a matter of life or
Anbar 43 death for him which reflects the crucial nature of this civilizing mission to his self-identification and affirmation. Henderson claims that his burning desire to intervene is part of the effect the tribe has on him: “So that at the first sight of the town I felt that living among such people might change a man for the better. It had done me some good already, I could tell. And I wanted to do something for them—my desire for this was something fierce” (HRK 77). He considers it a step forward towards self-fulfillment. He links his intervention to universal themes: “The earth is a huge ball which nothing holds up in space except its own motion and magnetism, and we conscious things who occupy it believe we have to move too, in our own space. We can’t allow ourselves to lie down and not do our share and imitate great entity” (HRK 79). Henderson’s American hegemony materializes in his imperialist dream to save the world. His obligation towards the Africans happens to coincide with his own interests. He voluntarily offers to purify their source of water and takes complete responsibility for that: “I’m doing this on my own responsibility” (HRK 88). His confidence reflects an imperialist centrism. He emphasizes his superiority as an outsider through his presumed saving mission. His dream to win the Africans’ admiration and gratitude stands for the imperialist dream to do the subjugated people a favor: “And my idea was that when I had performed my great deed against the frogs, then the Arnewi would take me to their hearts” (HRK 98). To help the Arnewi is compelling because he comes “from the great outside” (HRK 106). The binary opposition of savage/civilized is actively working here. By showing America as great and Africa in need of help, Bellow creates by contrast a diminutive image of Africa. Sure of victory, Henderson daydreams of it: “[T]herefore I decided that as my reward for ridding them of the vermin, I would ask them to teach me to whistle. I thought it would be thrilling to pipe on me own fingers like that” (HRK 73). He reiterates dreaming of victory: “I’ll annihilate and blast those frogs clear out of that cistern, sky-high, they’ll wish they had never come down from the mountain to bother you. Not only I molani [live] for myself, but for everybody” (HRK 85). He does not live only for himself but also for everybody else. Margret Wetherell illustrates in
Anbar 44 Mapping the Language of Racism (1992) this tendency of the imperialists to forge and naturalize their imperialist intentions : “Dominant social groups have a particular interest in falsity, in covering over the exploitive nature of their relations with other groups, and in representing these relations as natural, enduring and in everyone’s interest” (31). Henderson’ resolution to purify the cistern from the frogs takes a military form. He impetuously suggests blasting it: “I told Romilayu, ‘the only method that figures is a bomb. One blast will kill all these little buggers, and when they’re floating dead on the top all we have to do is come and skim them off, and the Arnewi can water their cattle again. It’s simple’ ” (HRK 93). When Romilayu attempt to object to his resolution, he silences him scornfully: “What, No, no, sah! Don’t be a jerk, I’m an old soldier and I know what I’m talking about” (HRK 93). Henderson is motivated by his colonialist ambition. His compelling desire to bring a relief to the Arnewi is a pure imperialist’s desire to dominate through benevolence. Bombastically, Henderson explains how he fulfills his liberating and civilizing mission: “I held the bomb above my head like the torch of liberty in New York harbor, saying to myself, ‘Ok, Henderson. This is it. You’d better deliver on your promise. No horsing around, and so on.’ You can imagine my feelings” (HRK 109). Yet, he fails in his mission as the whole reservoir is destroyed. His presumed good intentions turn destructive in a dramatic way. He blows their only source of water with his shortsighted vision brought about by mental conceit and cultural condescension. Henderson causes environmental damage. Ashcroft classifies environmental damage as, “one of the most damaging aspects of Western civilization” (The Empire Writes Back 213). The Arnewis’ reaction to Henderson’s destructive intervention is silence. They evince no objection or reproach of any sort on their side. Their silence signifies subordination to the colonizer. Henderson has manipulated their inability to take an action with regards to their polluted source of water to empower himself over them and increase his self-confidence. He rashly thrust himself into the action and felt surprised of negative consequences.
Anbar 45 There is, however, no genuine regret on Henderson’s part for his destructive act. His perturbation does not last long. In fact, he only refers to the incident later on because he is concerned that he might be discovered by the other tribe. He tells Romilayu when they arrived at the Warriri’s village: “But you won’t say anything about the frogs and the cistern, now will you, Romilayu” (HRK 114). He reiterates: “You don’t think they’ve heard about the frogs, do you” (HRK 129). He is only worried about himself. Henderson forgives himself easily for destroying the source of water. It is a characteristic of Bellow who, “was a master of self-exculpation” (Atlas 165). Bellow never blames himself for failure of books or his several marriages. In this respect, Henderson and Bellow are alike. Indeed, Bellow and Henderson share the same characteristics. Bellow himself affirms the strong affinity between both of them. When asked by Nina Steers in 1946: “Which of your characters is most like you,” Bellow replies, “Henderson—the absurd seeker of high qualities” (Cronin et al, 34). This pronouncement makes the intrinsic connection between them indisputable and the dividing lines less sharp. In another interview (1979) Maggie Simmons asks him “Who else you feel was a liberating character?” He refers to Henderson saying: “I got a stupendous break with Henderson the Rain King. That man [Henderson] was talking through his hat and therefore could say whatever he pleased. And he turned out to a considerable rhetorician” (Cronin et al, 162). Bellow internalizes Henderson. Henderson is a first narrator speaking with the power of omniscience, assuming an all-knowing perspective on the story being told: presenting private thoughts, narrating hidden events, and jumping between spaces. Bellow seems to be parodying himself consciously or unconsciously through his protagonist on having him express implicitly his prejudice against the Africans. He is present in the images, narrative structure and motifs of the novel. Rashly and in an act of avoidance, Henderson leaves the first tribe. Audaciously, he soon decides to view his negative experience in a positive light:
Anbar 46 And remembering the frogs and many things besides I sat beside the fire and glowered at the coals, thinking of my shame and ruin, but a man goes on living and, living, things are either better or worse to a fellow. This will never stop, and all survivors know it. And when you don’t die of a trouble somehow you begin to convert it—make use of it, I mean. (HRK 114) The result of the cistern incident is catastrophic, yet Henderson chooses to ignore that. He concedes that he has done something wrong but he decides to view his destructive act positively believing that his experience is not negative after all and that he can make use of it. His decision is pertinent to Teun Van Dijk’s notion of “apparent concession.” In a racist discourse, this notion exists, “when it is conceded that we have done something . . . but it is then added that our negative action is excused or mitigated . . .” (170). Henderson mitigates the dreadfulness of his action by his decision to make use of his negative experience. His act of mitigation is combined with a negative representation of the Africans. His enactment, though unsuccessful, is contrasted with the Africans’ inaction. His impulsive act to purify the contaminated source of water is similar to Bellow’s beginning to make an outline for his writing as he tells Nina Steers (1964): “My ambition is to start with an outline but my feelings are generally too chaotic and formless. I get full of excitement which prevents foresight and planning. . . . My faults of character emerge in my writing. I like to think things will work themselves out” (Cronin et al, 31). Henderson’s and Bellow’s ways of thinking are identical in their chaotic drives. His interaction with the Wariris polishes further his colonialist image. They pay him great respect and enhance his self-image as a civilized man. Deceptively, he is nice towards the Africans: “I did my best to perform the social rigmarole with Horko. He wished me to admire his bridge table, and to oblige him I made several compliments on it, and said I had one just like it at home. As indeed, I do in the attic” (HRK 151). He pretends to admire Horko’s bridge table comparing it to his own at home when in fact his is stored up in the attic. This pretence is
Anbar 47 necessary to maintain their respect for his image as a civilized man but he cannot help mocking them internally for believing him. Bellow highlights the negative difference between the savage and civilized world. He has King Dahfu refine Henderson’s image on many occasions. He specifically admires his physical strength, “‘you seem mos’ interesting person. Especially in point of physique. Exceptional,’ he said. ‘I am not sure I have encountered your category’” (HRK 155). On another occasion, the king tells him: “I think you are like a monument. Believe me, I have never seen a person of your particular endowment” (HRK 155). In the words of the king, Henderson is distinguished as civilized: “Many things since my return I felt lacking which I would not have suspected while at school. You are my first civilized visitor” (HRK 156). Henderson’s physical strength and civilized behavior seem to capture the king’s attention the most: Then the king observed, to my surprise, “You do not show too much wear and tear of the journey. I esteem you to be very strong. Oh, vastly. I see at glance. You tell me you were able to hold your own with Itelo? Perhaps you were practicing mere courtesy. At a snap judgment you do not seem very courteous. But I will not conceal you are a specimen of development I cannot claim ever to have seen.” (HRK 162) The king’s admiration of Henderson’s civilized behavior parallels Henderson’s admiration of himself: “For I had a certain pride in my strength . . .” (HRK 162). The colonial system thrives on the notion of self-aggrandizement of the colonizer and grateful appreciation of the colonized. Boehmer contends: “Undeniably, the Empire would not have survived as long as it did without the early co-operation of colonized elites” (HRK 115). The African rulers’—Itelo, Dahfu, Mtalba— approbation of Henderson is a kind of cooperation and support of his colonialist interventions. Bellow’s fantasy needs this support and admiration of the colonized to complete itself. On the other hand, Henderson cannot trust the king: “As I couldn’t trust him, I had to understand him. Understand him? How was I going to understand him? Hell! It would be like
Anbar 48 extracting an eel from the chowder after it has been cooked to pieces” (HRK 161). Although the king thinks positively of him, Henderson distrusts him. He is suspicious of the king’s intentions: “Nevertheless I began to realize that the king would certainly use me if he could” (HRK 164). His suspicion is not momentary because he reflects also later on his uncertainty of the king’ allegiance: “And now this powerful black personage soothed me―but was he trustworthy” (HRK 210). This mistrust exposes Henderson’s real feelings towards the Africans; he can never respect them as his equal. Another vital invasive incident occurs when Henderson lifts up the idol of Mummah during the Wariri’s rain ceremony. Henderson’s pride at his physical strength entices him to fall back into his colonialist habit of intervention. To mask his colonial intrusion, Henderson calls it a “benefit”: My longing to perform a benefit there, because I was so taken with the Arnewi, and especially old blind-eye Willatale, was sincere and intense, but it was not even ripple on the desire I felt now in the royal box beside the semibarbarous king in his trousers and purple velvet hat. So inflamed was my wish to do something. For I saw something I could do. (HRK 186) It seems that Henderson is affected by his American cultural and political background in his compelling desire to perform a benefit. Performing a benefit is a colonialist excuse for intervention exercised by politicians from superpower countries over less powerful nations. I also think the whole episode of lifting up the idol of Mummah is a struggle between civilization and savagery. It allows Henderson to demonstrate feelings of cultural hegemony. Henderson will not accept to be defeated by the savages. Although he is completely ignorant of the Wariri’s rain ritual and its consequences, he cannot think logically at that moment because he seems overruled by his desire to assert himself: “My heart desired only one great object. I had to put my arms about this huge Mummah and raise her up. . . Never hesitating, I encircled Mummah with my arms. I was not going to take no for an answer” (HRK 192). He is very thrilled over his victory, yet he plays modest and depicts the thrill of the Wariri instead:
Anbar 49 The Wariri, however, were still demonstrating in my honor, flaunting the flags and clattering rattles and ringing hand bells while they climbed over one another with joy. That was all right. I didn’t want such special credit for my achievement, especially considering how much I was the gainer personally. (HRK 194) The king praises him: “You see the Bunam felt sure you would be strong enough to move our Mummah. I, when I saw what a construction you had, agreed with him. At once” (HRK 205). Yet, Henderson’s intrinsic goal is more than admiration. He wants to win. Blinded by his colonialist mental conceit and feeling of physical supremacy, Henderson does not investigate beforehand the outcomes of his intervention. The consequence of lifting up the idol is to become the Wariri’s Rain King, a religious position, and as a Rain King, he will succeed the tribe’s king in case of the latter’s death. These two positions involve certain political and religious duties that he has to perform. On the basis of cultural and political inferiority, Bellow disqualifies the Africans in Henderson the Rain Kin. He presents them as incompetent to rule, or even to elect representatives of their tribe members. The intention of Bellow’s representation of the African’s incompetent political order is to degrade them. This incompetency is reflected in the Arnewi’s queen’s inability to take an action against Henderson when he ruined the tribe’s only source of water. It is also evident in the Wariris’ insistence to follow the tribal rituals of succession even if they are outdated and might cause the death of the king. The representation of the colonized community as politically passive is, thus, integral to the legitimization of a foreigner’s rule. Bellow negatively presents Africa so as to justify Henderson’s colonialist actions. The image of a static and disqualified political Africa is part of Bellow’s subversive colonization process. It comes in contrast to the image of America as democratic and dynamic. His aim is to intervene in the Africans’ political system in order to undermine it. An aspect of colonialist subversion is control over dialogue. Henderson is the chief arbiter of representation. Granville Hicks notes how remarkably revealing Henderson’s manner of speech
Anbar 50 is: “The style is the man, and Henderson is revealed to us not only by what he says but also by the way in which he says it” (Bach et al,101). Bellow’s construction of dialogue between his protagonist and the Africans is one sided, that is, Henderson does all the talk while the Africans listen. Sometimes, the Africans produce fragmented sentences. At the best, the dialogue is comprehensive and sound when it is in favor of Henderson. He is all authoritarian in this regard. Bellow chooses to silence the Africans to boost his protagonist’s hegemonic presence among them: “I made him a salute but he didn’t appear to think much of it and his leather face answered nothing” (HRK 116). He has already depicted earlier how the Africans helplessly express their grief over the loss of their cattle by crying. His way reinforces the notion that the Africans are emotional, helpless and speechless. It is a deliberate act of silencing that aims at excluding them from civilization. According to Spurr, language is a measurement of civilization: For Western thought, one of the fundamental measures of a culture is the quality of its language. Language comes to be judged according to its richness and complexity, its refinement from mere cry and gesture, its capacity to make distinction, its multiplicity of names, its range from particularity to abstraction, and its organization of time and place. (102) Henderson further draws the Africans as speechless men using signals to interact with them: “Finally one of the men came down, covered by the rest, and without speech but stoically, as soldiers usually do, he took the .375 and ammunition and knives and other weapons, and ordered us to get up” (emphasis added, HRK 117). On another occasion, they do not answer Henderson’s
questions: “‘Could we see the king? I know a friend of his and I am dying to meet him,’ I said. . . . To this no reply was made either ” (emphasis added, HRK 133). Since language is a measurement
of civilization, their silence makes them appear as savage and he by contrast, since he is making all the speech, appears civilized. Though Romilayu supposedly speaks English as a guide, Bellow structures his sentences to be either grammatically incorrect or wrongly pronounced: “I no know, sah. Dem no so people like
Anbar 51 Arnewi’/ ‘On they’re not, eh? But you won’t say anything about the frogs and the cistern, now will you, Romilayu?’ ” (HRK 114). Notably, Romilayu’s sentences are answers to Henderson’s questions: “Do they keep a lion in the palace?’/He said uncertainly, ‘Dem mus’ be’” (HRK 129). It is Bellow’s way of discrimination. He deliberately highlights their deficient use of English when he could simply summed it up in good English instead of insisting on presenting it in a dialogue form. The practice of dialogue presentation places them at disadvantageous position in comparison to Henderson. Henderson crowns his assertion of linguistic supremacy with a superseding attitude which proves that to highlight language impediment is a deliberate strategy. Henderson’s conversation with Romilayu becomes strongly imperative when he is very anxious: “But listen, you go and tell them, Romilayu, that I refuse to sleep in a morgue. I have waked up next to the dead all right, but that on the battlefield.” And I started to storm at him, “Go on,” I said. “I’ve given you an order. Go awake somebody. Judas! This is what I call brass.” Romilayu cried, “Mistah Henderson, sah, whut I do?” “Do what I tell you,” I yelled. . . . (HRK 136) Henderson’s dominant attitude with Romilayu reveals how he really thinks of him; he thinks of him as a slave not as a native guide. It is not an egalitarian friendship as Henderson tried to show. The slave/master dichotomy is a decisive feature of discrimination. Spurr reflects on this salient attitude: “The anxiety of colonial discourse comes from the fact that the colonizer’s power depends on the presence, not to say the consent, of the colonized” (11). It is a repressive kind of dialogue that denies the Africans’ identities and civilization. Bellow constructs language to mirror the uneven discourse of power relations between the East and the West. He uses dialogue to demote the natives to an inferior status because their values are incompatible with American values. Bellow’s humanistic values are problematic and biased because they deny the African autonomous being. He denies them their diversity and distinctiveness through stereotyping and
Anbar 52 “othering” them. Bellow’s American ethnicity shapes his artistic vision and controls his portrait of Africa and its people. He offers a convincing account of the American crisis of identity during a turbulent period, but the way in which a resolution is reached to reconstruct that identity through dehumanizing the “Other” is dishonorable. The text subtly demonstrates the constitution of Henderson’s American identity through “othering” and stereotyping the Africans. Tony Morrison explains why “othering” is so crucial to the formation of American identity: “Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny” (52). She illustrates that “Africanism” is psychologically a vehicle of salvation for the American person because it delivers him to the ultimate state of selffulfillment. It is a definition through negation. Bellow uses the Africans to deliver Henderson to self-fulfillment. It would be incomplete, indeed, to read this work simply as an exploration of the self or as a condemnation of World War II and modernization. The text poses the questions of how much Bellow’s humanistic presentation is authentic, how does his protagonist form his identity, rather than asking why he goes to Africa? Henderson’s identity begins to take form on his encounter with two different African tribes, the Arnewi and Wariri. The interaction with the Arnewi people and their prince, Itelo, as well as the interaction with the Wariri and their king, Dahfu, reveals to the readers much about Henderson’s real character and interior motives. His exotic experience with them allows for self-knowledge at the end. Falling within the canon of colonial literature, Henderson the Rain King is an “imaginary” and “symbolic” colonialist text. Abdul R. JanMohamed’s concept of the imaginary text is as one where, “the native functions as an image of the imperialist self in such a manner that it reveals the latter’s self-alienation.” This process creates a “fixed opposition between the self and the native.” In the imaginary colonialist text the native stands for evil operating thus automatically the
Anbar 53 “Manichean Allegory.” The symbolic text shows, “the inevitable necessity of using the natives as a mediator of European desire.” Both imaginary and symbolic texts function “to articulate and justify the moral authority of the colonizer and . . . to mask the pleasure the colonizer drives from that authority” (19). The “symbolic” and the “imaginary” are both present and overlap in this text. Henderson feels different from the Africans yet he desperately needs them to form his identity. Henderson’s achieving of identity, of who he is and what he wants to be, is realized through deconstructing the African’s identity. He endows the natives with wicked and barbaric characteristics. His discourse about the “Other” underpins ethnocentrism and thus racism. Teun Van Dijk’s suggests that, “racism should be in fact called ethnicism” (146). I concur with him on that ethnicity operates prejudice and racism against certain cultures. To overlook Bellow’s colonialist representation is to undermine the complexity of his vision. His humanistic values aggrandize the white American man whereas they ignore or devalue the humanity of the black man. The distorting effect of the protagonist’s surveillance of Africa betrays Bellow’s interior anxiety at the Africans’ failing to meet the standards of the American white man’s values. Bellow finds difficulty in understanding the Africans because he cannot negate the ideology of his culture. As a colonialist author, he strives to assert his ethnic American identity by thriving on oppositions. The Africans in Henderson the Rain King are made to feel inferior and treated as inferior in a way that enhances the colonizer’s self-image. As long as Africa is judged by Bellow’s American values, it remains a culturally diverse sphere that exists beyond his American comprehension. His colonial discourse about them is shaped by the relation of power. Binarism is deployed to show dominance of the superpower. Further, the interplay of response to the “Other” in terms of identity and difference operates with different degrees of complexity in Henderson the Rain King and accounts for ambivalence in the text. It helps mask the colonizer‘s gratification at his hegemony. The ambivalence is apparent in two aspects of the text: (1) the contradiction of Saul Bellow’s artistic presentations which manifests itself in juxtaposing comedy and fantasy in the work; (2) the contradictions that mold
Anbar 54 Henderson’s discourse which suggest conflicting messages about his ideological and political stance towards the Africans. Henderson’s colonial relationship with the Africans shows distinct contradictions of both exclusion and inclusion. Ambivalence stems from the contradictory way in which the Africans are constructed; paradoxically different from the self, yet exotically integral to identity. The rhetorical modes expose Bellow’s biased humanism and his racial politics of representations of the Africans. That the Africans are inherently black is a fact but the implication and the proposition of Bellow’s racial black discourse casts it in a colonialist light. He homogenizes them into a collective black, savage and lazy to essentialize their difference. He shows them as incapable of mastering their problems, and therefore justifying the necessity of his protagonist’s invasive actions. Simultaneously, they are encouraged to welcome the benefit of the American rule, support it and succumb to it. The stereotypical image of the Africans as primitive, exotic, savage, sexual, backward and incompetent to rule evokes cultural, social and political contempt of them. Bellow’s work is discriminatory. Bellow’s approach to Africa is essentially ethnocentric because he bases his knowledge of Africa on white man’s observations. Anthropology apparently privileges Bellow to codify Africa and its people. His knowledge of Africa is the result of his study of anthropology, sociology and reading of books on Africa by white scholars. Conceitedly, he says, “Why should I go to Africa?” (Cronin et al, 7). He has not found it necessary to do so. He feels that reading about Africa gave him enough knowledge to write about it. It is an absolute colonizer’s mental conceit. His depiction of Africa draws heavily from the following books: Melville J. Herskovits’s The Cattle Complex in East Africa, Reverend John Roscoe’s The Banyankole, The Soul of Central Africa, Frederick E. Forbes’s Dahomey and the Dahomans, and finally Sir Richard Burton’s A Mission to Gelele the King of Dahomey (Rodrigues 243, 244,245, 255). Besides, he admits: “I have learned there is more truth in my imagination than there is in the public relations habits of minorities” (Atlas 409). He textualizes his fantasy believing that his
Anbar 55 imaginative representation of minorities is more credible than truth itself. Bellow’s creation lacks authenticity because he does not write this book about Africa following an empirical exposure to its people and sites. His representation of this foreign land and its inhabitants is only a replica of others’ and a fantasy he creates. The fact that he does not mention real places or specify location is a proof of the fantasy element in his creation. Fantasy serves to disguise Bellow’s imperialist discourse. I agree with Sara Cohen in regards to the presence of fantasy in the novel, but not in describing it as a “whimsical fantasy” (116). I would rather call it a “colonial fantasy.” Elleke Boehmer lists “achievement of identity” (76) among the components of narrative that have the power to speed up the imperial fantasy. A “colonial fantasy,” Bhabha says, “[o]n the one hand, . . . proposes a teleology—under certain conditions of colonial domination and the native is progressively reformable. On the other, however, it effectively displays the ‘separation,’ makes it more visible” (118). Thus, the presence of fantasy in a literary text creates ambivalence; the natives can progress in certain colonial occasions yet they are still helpless and incapable to lead or govern. What makes Bellow’s fantasy colonialist is that it pictures the Africans as exotically beautiful, yet also as prejudicially uncivilized. He forges an imaginative Africa which thwarts a genuine comprehension of it. Actually, Bellow’s imaginative portrait of Africa is based “upon a sovereign Western consciousness” (Said, Orientalism 8). Said proposes that the American or European scholar who studies the Orient, “belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belong to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer” (Orientalism 11). According to Said, the Orient/East exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. This Orient is the “Other” in any colonial discourse. Bellow portrays the Africans out of his American colonial right to imagine the “Other.” His portrait is determined by his essentialist ideas on the Africans. There is a fixation in regards to understanding the “Other.”
Anbar 56 Henderson escapes Africa at the end as if he is afraid that the curse of backwardness will inflict him. The gap between the white and black man remains un-bridgeable. He does not want to go native. His escape at the end symbolizes his rejection of primitivism and asserts the irreconcilable differences played by Bellow earlier. To disregard Bellow’s masked racism and the dissemination of his colonialist ideas in the novel would be an oversight. Bellow is a creature of his ethnocentric American culture regardless of his attempt to mask that. It took Bellow some time to drop his mask and express freely his racist ideology against certain nations as will be seen in the next chapter.
Anbar 57
Chapter Two To Jerusalem and Back:Unmasked Racism To Jerusalem and Back is a travelling account but unlike Henderson the Rain King it is a real one: real places, real characters and real issues. Saul Bellow’s destination now is Jerusalem. But why did he choose Jerusalem? He did because he was a Jew. The importance of Jerusalem lies in its religious significance to both the Jews and Muslims. The Jews claim their right to the land because they think they are descendents of God— children of God and His loved ones— they want to regain the Temple and they want to fulfill what they believe to be God’s Promise of Return. The centrality of the city to Islam is due to the fact that it is the third of sanctities, the first of two directions, and the prophet’s night journey to and from heaven was through Jerusalem. Each group claims its rights to the land based on historical or religious facts. Bellow’s ethnicity is a significant force in this travel account. The author is no longer capable of subverting the question of his ethnic identity in To Jerusalem and Back . His dilemma as a Jew surfaces in a prominent way that suggests a cultural dimension to the question of Jewish identity. Bellow in this work is preoccupied with the identity of a nation, the Jews—an identity that is pertinent to conflict over land. Bellow’s Jewish prejudiced national feelings are manifest in his colonialist discourse against the Arabs. This chapter attempts to show how Bellow’s ethnocentrism is closely connected with his racialized colonialist discourse. His racist ideology against the Arabs materializes in his selection of Pro-Jewish political and academic thinkers to discuss the Palestinian-Jewish cause. The author encountered in Jerusalem many Jewish intellectuals such as: Mayor Teddy Kollek, A.B. Yehoshua , David Shahar, Professor Tzvi Lamm, Mikhail Agursky, Morris Janowitz, Yuval Ne’eman ,Walter Laqueur, Professor Malcom H. Kerr, Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi, Elie Kedourie and Professor Joseph Ben-David. The Jewish intellectual community Bellow mingles with in his journey has a passion towards Israel, Jews and Zionism as will be seen in this chapter. Bellow excludes the native Arabs from discussion. They are present only through his colonialist
Anbar 58 discourse. Abu Zuluf, editor of El Kuds newspaper, is the only Arab personality allowed to speak in this memoire because he sings the praises of Israel. The author selectiveness is a Zionist policy that serves the Jewish cause. This chapter explores how Bellow’s discourse on the Arabs is colonialist and racial in its essence. His discourse incorporates negation and debasement of the colonized, naturalization of colonization, affirmation and idealization of the colonizer’s self-image. It manifests itself in the mechanism of binary structure, stereotyping and othering. This mechanism helps to create boundaries, classify positions and segregate groups. It shows Bellow’s anxiety to preserve difference. I will deal in this chapter with Bellow’s imbalanced characterization of four groups: the Jews, the Arabs, the Pro-Israelis and the Pro-Arabs. He provides a counter image of the Arabs and Israelis. This chapter aims at highlighting Bellow’s negative stereotypical representation of the Arab native in opposition to his positive stereotypical representation of the Jews. He accuses the Pro-Arabs of ignorance, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, whereas he commends the Pro-Israelis’ civilization and efforts to create peace. As Henderson is the focus of Bellow’s humanistic concerns in Henderson the Rain King, the Jews in To Jerusalem and Back are the target of these concerns. Bellow declares his intention to remain humanistic though he wrongly believes that politics and humanistic concerns correlate: “[P]erhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics. Then human feelings, human experience, the human form and face, recover their proper place—the foreground” (TJB 20). He brings human values to the fore, but he does it only with the Jews. At the outset, Bellow’s Jewish ethnicity emerges in To Jerusalem and Back on seeing the crowd of Hasidim travelling on board with him to Jerusalem: “It is my childhood revisited” (2). Unlike the Africans whom he places beyond history, he views the Hasid he meets early in his trip as “a piece of history, an antiquity” (TJB 5). By describing the Hasid as historical, Bellow gives him supremacy and roots.
Anbar 59 Bellow depicts an ideal image of the Israeli Zionist Jews. They are represented as reformists on a worldwide level. They are unreasonably burdened by their civilizing mission. This burden affirms their civilization. It is an indication of their presumed cultural superiority and thus the cultural inferiority of other races. Bellow praises the Jews’ high moral bearing: “Jews are called upon . . . and call upon themselves to be more just and more moral than others” (TJB 26). He also claims that the European radicals expect the Jews “to hold up the moral burdens” (TJB 136). This claim to moral superiority is a strategy to affirm the civilization of the colonizer and the barbarism of the colonized. Bellow always compares the Jews to others making them appear better than the “Other,” which fits perfectly in the binary structure of his ideology. Indeed, the Jews’ obligation to justice and morality is limited to their cult and allies. It is a biased sense of justice and morality because it excludes other, the Arabs in this particular instance. The Jews, in the following passage from To Jerusalem and Back, do not like to think of themselves as aggressors but rather as victims: [T]he subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival—the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a few decades. At first this is hard to grasp because the setting is so civilized. You are in a city like many another—well, not quite, for Jerusalem is the only ancient city with modern utilities. . . . But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink. Uneasy, you go out to your civilized dinner. Bombs are exploding everywhere. (25) This passage unawaringly reveals an important fact. Palestine was not formerly an Israeli land. But the attitude is arrogant. Bellow’s speech about survival demonstrates assertion of a right to the land despite the fact that the Jewish-Israeli state is newly established. It is not their land; they occupied it. The passage also ignores the Palestinians’ motives behind violence, the fact that it is committed to defend land and identity pertinent to the land. Bellow in this speech portrays the
Anbar 60 Jews as civilized and peaceful in opposition to the Palestinians who are portrayed as barbaric and hostile. He believes that the Jews cannot live in peace because of the national revolutionary acts committed against them by the colonized. Ironically, they colonize and expect to be left alone and live in peace. Bellow commends the Jews as principled people, committed to a cause and believes that this is why others feel ill at ease with them: Jews do, it is well known, make inordinate demands upon themselves and upon one another. Upon the world, too. I occasionally wonder whether that is why the world is so uncomfortable with them. . . . And what is it that has led the Jews to place themselves, after the greatest disaster of their history, in a danger zone? A Jewish professor at Harvard recently said to me, “Wouldn’t it be the most horrible of ironies if the Jews had collected themselves conveniently in one country for a second Holocaust?” This is a thought that sometimes crosses Jewish minds. It is accompanied by the further reflection (partly proud, mostly bitter) that we Jews seem to have a genius for finding the heart of the crisis. (TJB 15) He pictures the Jews in afore quoted lines as colonized not as colonizers. The Jews’ major “crisis” is the Holocaust. Bellow employs the Holocaust historical incident— extermination of six million Jews by German Nazis— to gain sympathy. It is Bellow’s indirect justification of the Jews’ occupation of Palestine. Professor Jacob Leib Talmon also manipulates the Holocaust to make the world feel guilty about the loss of Jewish civilization: “Yes, while the Jews suffered under Hitler the conscience of the world was aware of them, but when they were dead that awareness also died. Ah, before 1939, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe created a rich, vital civilization—a cultural, a literature, institutions. It all went into the grave and into the ovens” (TJB 134). The Israeli Jews ask for continuous sympathy because of the persecution they suffered at the hands of the Nazis. They blame the Nazis for the loss of many of them and their civilization on the Holocaust.
Anbar 61 The Holocaust, indeed, should be cursed by the Jews as well as Arabs because each suffers its consequences. Palestinians pay the price of the Jews’ persecution at the hands of Nazis. In fact, Nazi extermination targeted others besides the Jews (Elmessiri 2.339), yet the Jews extensively manipulate the Holocaust to gain sympathy and legitimacy for their colonization of Palestine. I believe also that Bellow’s instrumentalization of the Holocaust incident helps dilute the effect of the Jewish crimes committed against the Arabs. Besides the Jews’ suffering as a race, personal suffering of Israeli Jewish individuals is dramatically highlighted by Bellow: “Yet here you sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. You know that your hostess has lost a son; that her sister lost children in the 1973 war . . . many other families have lost children” (TJB 25-26). Bellow reiterates that on other occasions: “There are few families in Israel that have not lost sons in the war” (TJB 36), and “the neighbors tell you of a war widow who is trying to bring up her children” (TJB 57). Such a presentation is very biased because it ignores the suffering and many losses of Arabs as well as blaming the Arabs for Israeli loss of lives. During the war of 1973 the number of Arabs killed ranges between 8,528 and 15,000 whereas that of the Israeli is 2,656. The Arabs’ loss is more massive. Yet Bellow’s humanistic values consider the Jews only which expose his prejudiced humanistic concerns. According to Bellow, although the Jews are victims, they are appealingly stoical, only that Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right. To be sure, many Israelis refuse to admit that this historic uneasiness has not been eliminated. They seem to think of themselves as a fixed power, immovable. Their point has been made. They are a nation among nations and will always remain so. (TJB 26) The speech attests to the superiority of the Jews. Bellow credits them as a nation who has the right to exist regardless of oppositions. He normalizes their colonization by identifying it as a right:
Anbar 62 “They embraced their most rightful dreams and clung to them” (TJB 70). It is an imperialist dream. This fanatic prejudice makes him a racist. The Jews are privileged as David Shahar, a novelist, believes in To Jerusalem and Back. He says that the Jews only have the determination to create peace. They also have been flexible and positive with regard to its conditions. They continually offer peace but the Arabs reject it “because the Arabs could not tolerate any Jewish state, not even a minuscule one. If a state was what they wanted, they might have had it years ago. They rejected it. And they invaded the country from all sides, hoping to drive the Jews out and take the wealth they had created” (TJB 37). Shahar’s speech depicts the Arabs as aggressive and the Jews as peace loving. The Jews are also advanced politically and economically and the Arabs crave their wealth. Though he knows that Shahar might not be saying the truth, Bellow does not deny it or confront him with his falsehood: “I know that some of what Shahar is saying is not true, but I say nothing” (TJB 37). Bellow’s silence about the matter is strange but can be explained as that Shahar’s lies are in compliance with his strategy of creating a Manichean colonial world. Shahar’s misrepresentation of the IsraeliPalestine cause suits Bellow who continues to affirm that the Arabs are inflexible and negative in regard to peace-process: The Arabs, says Rabin, are not interested in territorial concessions and will never be satisfied with them. They consider themselves owners and masters of this land. . . There is therefore no point in making offers, saying to the Arabs we will give you this or that piece of ground in return for recognition and peace. The hope is that as the Arab countries grow rich and modernize themselves they will grow less hostile, more concerned to produce goods than to fight. I say nothing but I doubt it greatly. (TJB 113) This discourse puts the blame on the Arabs for the war state between them and Israel on the ground that they are anti-peace by all measures. The Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shows no faith in the Arabs. He regards them an impossible case. This fixation is prejudice. Bellow, without
Anbar 63 reservation, links the Arabs’ backwardness and aggression to poverty. In fact, restriction rules and curfew laws imposed by the Jewish Israelis on the Palestinians are responsible for the Arabs’ poverty and anger; the Palestinians are not allowed to move freely between homeland counties or other Arab countries. They are not allowed proper education or prosperous trade. Bellow mistrusts the Arabs as he doubts that they can be better if their conditions become better. Bellow’s essentialist ideas about the Arabs ruin all chances of a positive thinking with regards to them. His colonist discourse naturalizes their aggression and backwardness, thus suggesting their innate inferiority and debased status. Bellow uses the binary structure to lecture the Americans on the Arabs’ aggression and uncooperative spirit: “Very few Americans seem to know, for instance, that when the [UN], in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arabs, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the [UN] plan, vowing to resist partition by force and assaulting the Jewish community in Palestine” (TJB 115). He claims that the Palestinians refuse peace pacts. He aims at showing them as politically immobile to demean them. Bellow, however, contradicts himself in regard to the Palestinians’ rejection of negotiating of peace proposals with the Israelis because evidently the matter is vice versa: “I know that the government will not negotiate with the PLO” (TJB 68). It is the Jews who reject the discussion of peace with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. This contradiction in statements indicates Bellow’s biased humanistic values and racialized colonialist discourse. He blames the Palestinians simply because he prejudicially believes in the right of the Jews to exist. Bellow depicts the Jews as superior in mind and history. Constant emphasis on the Jews’ grand history, I think, is intended to serve to legitimize their colonization of Palestine: Certain oddities about Israel: Because people think so hard here, and so much, and because of the length and depth of their history, this silver of a country sometimes seems quite large. . . . To live again in Jerusalem—that is almost like the restoration
Anbar 64 of the Temple. But no one is at ease in Zion. No one can be. The world crisis is added to the crisis of the state, and both are added to the problems of domestic life. It is increasingly difficult to earn adequate wages, since from the first Israel adopted the living standard of the West. (TJB 56-57) The Jews’ suffering, Bellow explains, is not limited to the colonized national resistance of colonization. They suffer economically because they choose to be civilized and embrace a Western style of living. They have to work diligently to earn decent wages and pay taxes. Suffering is a ramification of accepting the austere measures of the living standards of the West. Yet Bellow attests that in spite of the different kinds of pressures the Israelis face, they are not malicious: “Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country. People feel the pressure of enemies. . . Still, almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare. These are not weak, melting people” (TJB 57). According to Bellow, the Jews have no animosity towards their enemies. The world antagonizes the poor Jews but they are still idealistically virtuous: “Even the Chinese, who know little of Jews, are Israel’s enemies. Jews, yes, have a multitude of faults, but they have not given up on the old virtues” (TJB 57). Bellow praises Israel as forbearing and virtuous. This continued defense of the Israeli Jews helps Bellow polish his ethnic identity which was kept in the dark for a while. It also shows his discriminatory humanistic concerns which condemn him. Said says it is the norm to exempt Israel of its crimes against humanity, “Israel is not only seen as exempt from blame or responsibility . . ., Israel (like the United States) is praised for its humanity” (The Question of Palestine 45). Western superpowers never blame Israel for its brutal colonization of Palestine. They never condemn nor denounce Israelis’ atrocities even when Israel continues to escalate its atrocities and intensify its siege in the hope that the Palestinians will flee. Bellow’s biased humanism towards the Jews ignores the ramifications of their colonial act against the Palestinians. Among the ramification comes the appalling massacre of Deir Yassin by Menachem Begin and David Ben Gurion in 1948 where Zionist soldiers were blowing up Arab nationalists’ houses to
Anbar 65 set them as examples. Indeed, this dramatic massacre and others were intended to spread horror and fear among the Palestinians and to force them to leave their country; to depopulate. To the Jews, the loss of many Palestinians is not a concern. Their chief concern is expanding their settlement. This loss also seems not among Bellow’s humanistic concerns because he does not object to the crimes committed by the Israeli Jews against the Palestinians. The image of persecuted and deported Jews in To Jerusalem and Back evokes sympathy. Paradoxically, Bellow never talks about Palestinian Diaspora at the hands of the Jews. Bellow believes that the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine was inescapable, otherwise the Jews would be annihilated: “Perhaps many of those who had gone through the horror of death camps wanted to be together afterward. Their desire was to live together as Jews. Anyway it is idle to speak of alternatives. The founding of a state was inevitable. It was desperate, naked need that sent Jewish survivors to the Middle East. They were not working out historical problems in the abstract. They had to face extinction” (TJB 160). Although “[t]he founding of Israel was not sinless and pure” (TJB 160), he finds in their desire to live together a legitimate reason for their colonialization of Arab land. Bellow is thus justifying their crimes. He lessens the enormity of these crimes by depicting them as weak and unjustly treated. Bellow, moreover, accuses the UN of injustice because, “what others have done with a broad hand the Jews are accused of doing in a smaller way. The weaker you are, the more conspicuous your offenses; the more precarious your condition, the more hostile criticism you must expect” (TJB 161). He alludes to the idea that the Jews are discriminated against and they should not be held responsible for their small crimes. Bellow’s criticism of UN demonstrates the colonizer’s distorted logic. The Jewish colonizer recognizes his crimes, yet he refuses to be punished for them. In fact, Israel is pardoned, if not praised, when it oppresses the Arabs. Bellow does not want the world to be judgmental of the Israeli Jews in spite of their oppression of the Arabs during 1973 war. He regards Israel crimes against humanity an inevitable act of survival. To Bellow, Israel, above all, is a liberal and democratic country:
Anbar 66 While Israel fought for life, debaters weighted her sins and especially the problem of the Palestinians. In this orderly century refugees have fled from many countries. . . . but only the case of the Palestinians is held permanently open. Where Israel is concerned, the world swells with moral consciousness. Moral judgment, a wraith in Europe, becomes a full-blooded giant when Israel and the Palestinians are mentioned. Is this because Israel has assumed the responsibilities of a liberal democracy. (TJB 135) Indeed, there is a sense of Jewish-Israeli superiority implied in the above passage. Besides the moral responsibility the Jews hold which is mentioned earlier, they assume the responsibility of a liberal democracy. These multiple responsibilities show them as extraordinary nation. The Israeli Jews never fail to be democratic as Bellow says: “In the grip of crisis and encircled by hostile states, Israel has remained consistently democratic. It isn’t every country that would permit free elections in an occupied territory” (TJB 169). Certainly, the factor of democracy serves to dilute the effect of their oppression of the Arabs. It covers their crimes against the Arabs and violation of their human rights. Bellow ignores the issue of occupation preferring to commend Israel’s democracy. The Israeli Jews view themselves as the most democratic country since it absorbs Arab intellectuals. They are democratic with their enemy in a captivating away: “Another Arabist, Bernard Lewis, later tells me that the Arab intellectuals who speak most freely are to be found in Israel itself—in East Jerusalem and on the Israeli-occupied West Bank” (TJB 144). In other words, Israeli democracy is a form of hegemony. Bellow does not see in Israel’s claim to democracy a contradiction to what it does to Palestine. He finds in such a claim a justification to keep the Palestinians out of the country. He calls for a close of discussion of the refugees’ case. He wants the world to close its eyes to the injustice done to the Palestinians because other nations are doing the same thing, and because Israel is supposedly democratic, it can do without having to receive blame for it. The logic is weak, shaky and distorted. Indeed, the idea of democracy is a Zionist propaganda promulgated to distract the world’s attention away from Jewish sovereignty of the
Anbar 67 native Palestinians. In my opinion, the Israelis claim democracy as a pretext for their colonialization of Palestine. A.B. Yehoshua, described by Bellow as a fine Israeli writer, says that in spite of the Jews’ transparency, they are, unfortunately, misunderstood because they are different. He accuses the Arabs and German of insanity when they came into contact with the Jews because they did not understand them: To us our Jewish nature is clear and we can feel it —but it is hard to say that the world can understand it, and by a certain kind of logic one can even justify this lack of understanding, because when you come right down to it the phenomenon of the “Jew” is not easy one to understand. For nations which encounter us in a certain historical situation, like the German and the Arabs, our very existence and the uncertainty of our nature in their eyes could provide the spark for whatever kind of insanity was afflicting them at the time. (TJB 161-62) The difference between the Jews and the “Other” is what constitutes their role as colonizers. Besides, it explains their colonial presence in Palestine to the world. It is a reason among others. As said in Henderson the Rain King, the presence of the colonized matters to the colonizer because it is crucial to the identity formation of the latter. Since the time of the Greek civilization it has always been “the case that no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions: Greeks always require barbarians, and Europeans African, Orientals, etc” (Said, Culture and Imperialism 52). The Jews’ civilization mission depends on practicing political, social and ideological hegemony on the Palestinians. Bellow’s colonialist strategy does not change. It only became manifest in this memoir. Bellow explains that because of the depth of Jewish history, the Israeli Jews are required to work so hard on so many levels: In less than thirty years the Israelis have produced a modern country—doorknobs and hinges, plumbing fixtures, electrical supplies, chamber music, airplanes,
Anbar 68 teacups. It is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything to understand everything, to make provision for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. (TJB 46) Bellow is amazed by what he believes to be the Israelis’ accomplishment and how they use resources to better their lives in many respects though they face many challenges, “I don’t see how they can bear it” (46). It is a magnificent nation to him. He says: “I am fascinated by the profusion and ingenuity of Jewish ideas on the future of Israel” (TJB 80). He likes the Israelis’ future prospective for their country. He highly estimates the Israelis’ desire for exploration and modernization. Simultaneously, he cunningly refers to their persecution by Arabs and Nazis: The Israelis are great travelers. They need the world. When they feel the need—and they feel it often—they are obliged to go far. . . . From the eighteenth century, European Jews, when revolution began to release them from their ghettos, hastened to enter modern society; they adored and hungered for it—its cities, its political life, its culture, its great men, its personal opportunities. Even the Holocaust did not destroy this attraction. (TJB 89) The Jews’ love for travel is meant to highlight their love for knowledge and exploration. They are attracted to civilization and modernization. These two are thematic to Bellow’s presentation of the Jews because they are integral to their colonization of Palestine. Bellow highlights immensely the Jews’ goodness and charity. He never shows them as merciless or heartless. They do no evil but when they do that “[e]verything bad is done for the best reasons” because “[l]ife in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is a clear purpose in it. People are fighting for the society they have created, and for life and honor” (TJB 77,141). Bellow’s idea of Israel as country “with a sense of purpose” is borrowed from Professor Jacob Leib Talmon. He considers this sense of purpose “of first importance” (TJB 135). I believe it is important to Bellow
Anbar 69 because it justifies the unbridled use of Israeli power to colonize Palestine and dominate it. Their professed purpose is civilizing the Arabs. Bellow refers to the charity of Dr. Z, a Jewish gynecologist: “She comforts Jewish brides from the Arab countries who weep because they have been married two whole months and haven’t yet conceived” (TJB 97). There are two implications here; first, the Arab Jews are deported and denied, yet they receive comfort from their Israeli Jews fellows. Second, the Israeli Jews’ medical progress is appealing to the Arabs. There is no mention of Israel military forces that regularly demolish the Arabs’ houses. Bellow shows the “Other” here in need of the oppressors. By putting emphasis on the medical and economic progress made by the Jews, Bellow idealizes them. This colonialist discourse of idealization reflects the superiority of the Jews and the inferiority of the Arabs. Chaim Gouri, a poet and a journalist, used to help an influential Arab family looted by Israeli soldiers during the Six Day War. Yet, to his surprise, the daughter of this family proved ungrateful and expressed on one occasion her rejection of cohabitation with the Jews: “We will never accept the presence of Jews in our land” (TJB 50). Bellow reflects on the incident: “I didn’t say what I was thinking, but the matter was clear enough to me as an American and also as a Jew. He [Gouri] wished to influence these Arab friends by his goodness. The idea is to clean things up, to feed the hungry, to build schools and hospitals, to hire workers at high prices to which they are unaccustomed, to give back looted cars and necklaces, and thus to win all hearts” (TJB 50). As a matter of fact, civilizing the native society of Palestine is a kind colonial authority. It is a typical colonizer’s act to patronize the colonized “Other.” The colonized does not want the colonizer’s benevolence because he regards that a “colonial intervention.” He wants the colonizer out of his land, a fact Bellow chooses to ignore. Bellow tries to prove that civilizing is systematic of the Jews. He sets Mayor Teddy Kollek as an example of the civilizing colonizer. Kollek, a good speaker and observer, a man of action and graceful manners as characterized by Bellow, takes upon himself different civilizing missions in
Anbar 70 Palestine that are pretty much welcomed by the Palestinians: “What is entirely genuine in Kollek, without admixture, is his love for Jerusalem. Not even his detractors deny it. Christians and Arabs may not accept the rule of Israel, but they are satisfied with Kollek administration. I am told that without Arab votes Kollek would not have been-re-elected” (TJB 88). Bellow encourages the Arabs to welcome the benefit of Israeli rule, to support it and subordinate to it. He sets Kollek as a good example of a good Jewish colonizer. He is represented as a modernizing and civilizing person who is doing both parties justice: His impartiality is not seriously questioned; he has built apartment houses, kindergartens, and schools for Jews and Arabs alike. Kollek learns what the latest things are and brings them here. Plays are performed for Arab children who never saw a theater before. For the first time the holy places are equally respected. Kollek is not so naïve as to expect gratitude and cooperation from the Arabs in return. For one thing, the Arab world would accuse grateful Arabs of betrayal, the extremists would mark them for punishment. . . . Still, I often think that Kollek wants to show the world, and especially the Arab world , what good sense and liberality can do; he wants to persuade everyone that what is feasible on a small scale can be done wholesale. . . . The Arabs know that there is no meanness or arbitrariness in him. He has shown by his fairness that coexistence is possible and desirable. He is Israel’s most valuable political asset. (TJB 91) Bellow points out admiringly Kollek’s benevolent actions to both the Arab and Jews. He emphasizes that Kollek does not wait the appreciation of Arabs, though they should be grateful, because his intention is to teach them liberty and good judgment. In fact, the Jews need the Palestinians to affirm their presence, identity and practice hegemony. Within this binary logic of good Jews and bad Palestinians, Bellow does not attempt to create a balance or be just to the Palestinians. This binary structure reinforces the relation of hegemony, “the binary opposition itself exists to confirm dominance” (Ashcroft et all, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concept 24).
Anbar 71 Benevolence is not only a characteristic of Israeli Jewish individuals; it is also highlighted in the case of the Israeli-Jewish state. Between 1950 and June 1957: “Israel gave more than $ 6 million” (TJB 127) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency fund for the relief of Palestinian refugees. Indeed, idealization of the Jewish Zionist state attempts to polish its image before the world and to minimize the cruelty of its criminal acts. Abdulwahab Elmessiri enumerates 17 massacres that happened after the year 1948 and before the year 1967, among which were: Kafr Kassem Massacre (1956), Kibya Massacre (1953), Qalqilya Massacre (1953) and First Gaza Massacre (1955) (7:112-16). Bellow intensely highlights the positivity and charity of Zionism. Morris Janowitz, Bellow’s university colleague, is described as community-minded and busy with ideas for improving the university and keeping the neighborhood from further deterioration. He is knowledgeable, intelligent and a supporter of Israel and Zionism. Janowitz has faith in the entangled fate of Israel and Zionism, “the future of Israel rests on the intermingling of the Zionist impulse with the dilemma of the Jews scattered throughout the world” (TJB 166). Bellow glorifies Zionism as a ramification of Jewish nationalism. He permeates his enthusiasm for Zionism through Professor Tzvi Lamm of Hebrew University and Janowitz. Bellow‘s presentation of Lamm’s Zionist ideas in To Jerusalem and Back refines the image of Zionism. Lamm, a Zionist idealist, commends the Zionist leaders’ definite goals: “Its leaders knew how much power they had—or had not —and adhered to their goals. They were not hypnotized and paralyzed by their goals.” He demonstrates that the aim of Zionism is salvation of the Jews not redeeming the land although he admits the importance of God’s Covenant, of the Promised land, the Holy Land: “It [Zionism] arose in order to save a people in a critical situation by concentrating it within one territory, and allowing it to take its political fate in its own hand.” Bellow agrees with Lamm that: “Rescue is the true aim of Zionism—not the ‘liberation’ of the Promised Land but the rescue of the Jews, repeatedly threatened with annihilation” (TJB 66). This attention reveals Bellow’s biased humanistic concern; an exclusive concern for the Jews as human beings. It also
Anbar 72 exposes his phobia of death, his fear as embodied earlier in Henderson the Rain King and stated on many occasions of his friends’ death. There are several Jewish Zionist attempts in the Western and Israeli media to make the Zionists appear innocent and the Arabs guilty. These attempts echo in Professor Hakabi’s claims with regard to the Zionist presence in Palestine and the relationship between the Jews and Palestinians: The Zionists did not come into Palestine with a plan to expel the Arabs. Zionism hoped to establish a Jewish state, but when Herzl failed to obtain an international charter for such a state the Zionists limited themselves to the purchase of land for cultivation. This land was bought from Arabs, not taken by force. Jews had lived in Palestine continuously since ancient times. Nor did the arrival of Jewish settlers from Europe interfere with the Arab struggle for self-determination. Until recently there was no popular Arab nationalist movement and no struggle for selfdetermination. (TJB 151) The Jews targeted the land for cultivation as a strategy towards colonization. Elmessiri points out that agricultural settlement was fundamental to the Zionist colonization of Palestine (7.43). Colonization in any form is parallel with expulsion. If the Zionists wanted to coexist with the Arabs in Palestine, they were mistaken because colonization can never be accepted. It is like sharing identity. There should be resistance on the native side. The false theory of coexistence is further promoted in the text. David Shahar links the progress of Israel and Arabs with Zionism: “This country [Palestine] had been a desert, a land of wandering population and small stony farms and villages. The Zionist under the Mandate made such economic progress that they attracted Arabs from other areas. This is why the Arab population grew so large” (TJB 37). With farms and villages, it could not have been a desert. Yet this is what they liked to believe and propagate ignoring the more serious side of the issue, their
Anbar 73 silencing of the national consciousness and putting down resistance of the Palestinians. They tried to normalize colonization. Nationalism is not valued when triggered by the Arabs. Bellow recurrently highlights the colonizer’s so called success with regards to the land: “In this unlovely dreamland the Zionists planted orchards, sowed fields, and built a thriving society” (TJB 159). He also quotes Janowitz in this regard, “Israel has performed exceptionally well; the growth rate of West Bank agriculture has been very high since 1967, thanks to the Israelis . . .” (TJB 166). Janowitz finds this growth a legitimate reason for Israeli to govern the Arabs. He is frustrated at the Arabs’ rejection, “but the Arabs do not want to be governed by Israel. They insist on self-rule” (TJB 166). In fact, the Arabs are not alone in their insistence on self-rule. No nation ever wants or agrees on having outsiders rule it. They do not consider Israeli regime legitimate or benevolent because they are no more than colonizers in their view. The growth rate of West Bank agriculture is a lame excuse the Jews use to legitimatize colonization. Paradoxically, the theory of coexistence is negated by Golda Meir and approvingly quoted by Bellow in To Jerusalem and Back. She negates their existence in Palestine. She believes that Zionism caused no harm to the Palestinians because simply: “They did not exist” (TJB 158). Bellows agrees with her: “Precisely speaking she is right” (TJB 158). His agreement is based on the ground that the word “Palestinian” is designated by the Arab nationalists who “rejected the very idea of a separate Palestinian entity, insisting that the Arab lands were an indivisible whole” (TJB 158). Both deny the existence of the Palestinians in Palestine. Hence, according to them, it is justifiable that the Jews occupy the land since it is a land with no people. Negating and creating “nothingness” of the “Other” naturalizes colonization and practices of hegemony. Said believes that both Zionist and British powers created the image of the Palestinians as the “Other.” He says: “[B]oth British imperialist and the Zionist vision are united in playing down and even cancelling out the Arabs in Palestine as somehow secondary and negligible” (The Question of Palestine 18). The economic, agricultural and social progress of the Arabs is all attributed to the Zionist Jews. According to the Jews, it is due to the establishment of a Jewish-Israel that Arab laborers
Anbar 74 enjoy economic prosperity: “Their wages have risen, and there is no precedent for the prosperity they enjoy” (TJB 131). These statements imply that without the Israeli-Jewish state, the Arabs would have been poor and underprivileged. Bellow thus attributes the agriculture and economic flourishing of Palestine to the Jews’ colonization of Palestine, ignoring the truth that underneath their so called civilization and superiority there lie such evils as rape, abuse and bloodshed. Modernization of agricultural systems would have come around with or without colonization. But idealization of the colonizer is necessary for the process of colonization and its legitimatization. A post-colonial reading exposes this stance in Bellow. As a matter of fact, Bellow’s idealization of the Israeli Jews proves that he is Jewish to the marrow. Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi, who is supposed to be a specialty in Arab-Israeli conflict, pronounces in To Jerusalem and Back the most adverse judgment of the Arabs with regard to land, showing them as materialistic and dishonest people. He claims they are not as patriotic as they pretend to be. Harkabi sees that people of the West Bank in 1972 were busy with improving their economic situations that “many were indifferent to the question of their political future” (TJB 150). His saying that the Arabs are not interested in their political fate contradicts the Arabs’ fervent national struggle to free their land from the grip of the Jew-Israeli colonizer. He insists on questioning the nationalism of Arab Palestinians. The Arab Palestinians are pretty much attached to their land, yet Harkabi says: “The Palestinians Arabs gave little evidence of being particularly attached to the country, and many of their leaders themselves sold land, even while to the outside protesting against it” (TJB 151). I believe the claim that the Palestinians left their land voluntarily is a Jewish myth to legitimize their colonization of the land. In addition, it is “illegal buying” of lands because it was under force. The Arabs’ lands were expropriated by the Jews who made up many laws to take lands from the Palestinians based on the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 and Land Acquisition Law of 1953 (Said, The Question of Palestine 98). David Shipler believes in Arab and Jew that the Palestinians “were deliberately and forcibly expelled by the Jews. And others fled because they were convinced that if the Jews got into their
Anbar 75 villages, they would massacre men, women, and children as they had done in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in April 1948 . . .” (15). The Jews’ violence against native Palestinians is what led to their departure. The Jews committed many massacres against Arab Palestinians in order to drive them away. Therefore, the Palestinians run away to escape from the colonizer’s oppression and despotism. It is a Zionist process of creating nothingness of the “Other” in order, Elmessiri says, to actualize the Zionist propaganda that “Palestine is a land with no people for a people without land” (7.60). Said provides another reason for the Palestinians’ departure in The Question of Palestine: “If the Palestinians left in 1948, we are told, they did so because the Arab states urged them to do so in order that after a boasted victory, they could return in triumph” (48). According to Said there was an underestimation of Jewish colonization of Palestine. He attributes the matter to “a relative lack of Palestinian political, organizational response to Zionist effectiveness and, along with that a psychological mood of failure and terror” (101). Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, Lecturer at Hayfa University and a peace activist, illustrates in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine the cruelty of the Jews in colonizing Palestine. He uses the term “Ethnic Cleansing” to refer to depopulation and displacement of Palestinians. “Ethnic Cleansing” of 1948 was initially a vengeful reaction against the Palestinians’ national struggle. Yet it turned shortly into a systematic cleansing act of a whole country: random shooting, killing of villagers, rolling huge iron balls or tanks full of explosion towards the Palestinian populated areas, and harvesting souls by any means such as sending exploding cars to be fixed at Palestinians’ workshops” (Al-Hayat Ser. 2:20). These criminal acts are enough intimidating reasons for the Palestinians to run away with their lives and leave their lands. The red color in the map below shows the fast expansion of Jewish Zionist colonization from 1948 to 1967.
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World Assembly of Muslim Youth
Bellow, however, exonerates Zionist leaders from guilt of their criminal acts by naturalizing their right to exist: “Their sin was that they behaved like other people. Nation-states have never come into existence peacefully and without injustice. At the center of every state, at its very foundation, as one writer recently put it, lies a mass of corpses” (TJB 160). Thus, Bellow overtly states violence is necessary to the establishment of the Jewish-Zionist state. He finds it inevitable that the foundation of one nation is usually built on the grave of another. Bellow’s waiver of the moral cost of Israel’s violence exposes his double humanistic values. The attitude extends to other Arab nations. Bellow pictures the Arab Jordanians as inhuman when they resist Jewish colonization of their land: “The Jordanians built a road over Jewish grave” (TJB 16). This comment is evidence of Bellow’s double standard. The manifest contradiction in Bellow’s humanistic approach towards different nations is ethnocentric. This ethnocentrism shows that his humanistic interests are exclusive to his race. Bellow also quotes Harkabi who acquits Israel of its criminal acts for the sake of its survival as the following passage indicates: He [Harkabi] concedes that the Arabs have been wronged, but he insists upon the moral meaning of Israel’s existence. Israel stands for something in the Western history. . . the Zionists were not deliberately unjust, the Arabs were not guiltless. To rectify the evil as the Arabs would wish it rectified would mean the destruction of Israel. Arab refugees must be relieved and compensated, but Israel will not commit suicide for their sake. (TJB 158)
Anbar 77 This passage explains why Bellow describes Harkabi as “balanced” (TJB 157). Harkabi espouses Israel military might based on its presumed right to exist. He also admits that the survival of Israel comes first before any other consideration. The creation of an Israeli Jewish state impels false vague and implicitly scanty compensation for the Palestinians. It is obvious that Bellow supports Harkabi’s logic because he calls him balanced. Harkabi’s prejudiced negative stance attests to Bellow’s biased humanistic values and Jewish ethnicity. James Atlas asserts the persistence of Bellow’s Jewish identity: “However vehemently he maintained that he was an American writer who happened to be a Jew, Bellow identified strongly and publicly with the fate of his people” (369). Jewishness evokes in him profound feeling of identification. Atlas attests to Bellow’s deep attachment to his ethnic root: “He clung to his origins the way he clung to his neuroses; to leave them behind would be to alter his fundamental nature” (294). Bellow’s ethnocentrism seems inescapable because it is in his basic nature to be a Jew. The nature of Bellow’s colonialist discourse becomes visibly antagonizing of the Arabs. Bellow’s biased humanism and demeaning racialized discourse appear in his imbalanced presentations of the Israeli Jews and Arabs. In a colonialist act of debasement, Bellow shows the Arabs as uncooperative. When Arab students are asked to participate in searching for bombs at the campus of the Hebrew University, they refuse. He says: “In my opinion it was a mistake to ask that they be part of such patrols” (TJB 34-35). Life endangering tasks enlist commitment to political order and self-sacrifice. These principles are ignored when Palestinians are condemned for not scarifying their lives to keep a Jewish community alive. Submission to the colonizer is integral to colonization. The Arabs are portrayed as anti peace because they resist colonization: “They don’t want our peace proposals. They don’t want concessions, they want us destroyed” (Shahar, TJB 38). Indeed, this image of uncooperative Arabs dehumanizes them whereas, according to Bellow, it reflects the civilization of the Israeli Jews. It suggests the latter’s superiority. They are always ready and willing to negotiate peace. A settlement with Israel is impossible. Actually, the Palestinians refuse to negotiate with the Israelis
Anbar 78 not because they refuse peace but because that negotiation means recognition of the Israeli Jewish state. The Israelis want the Arabs to accept coexistence and to compromise with them, otherwise they are regarded unethical and uncooperative. Any national feelings are interpreted as hostile acts. The Arabs are depicted as merciless whose sole aim is to annihilate the Israeli Jews who presumably make no demand beyond the wish to survive. Bellow believes that the Jews’ peaceful life is threatened also by the Arabs’ terrorism: “Relaxing, breathing freely, you feel what a wonderful place has been created here, a homeplace for body and soul; then you remember that on the beaches there are armed patrols. It is always possible that terrorists may come in rubber dinghies that cannot be detected by radar” (TJB 62). Palestinians’ violence is the answer to the annihilation of their social forms, and the destruction of their economic system and life by the Israeli Jews. Fanon believes that “[a]t the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (49). Yet Bellow never identifies Palestinians’ acts as national struggle because that means condemning the Jews. Bellow’s colonialist ideology validates stereotyping the Arabs as terrorist because they were daring enough to resist the Israeli Jews’ settlement. David Shahar says in To Jerusalem and Back that the Jews live under a daily threat because of the Arabs’ terrorist acts against them: “Terrorist violence always threatens and often occurs” (TJB 35). He furiously lectures Bellow on Jews’ extermination by the Arab. Shahar thinks it is a conspiracy against the Jews. He imagines France and Britain as accomplices in the Arabs’ conspiracy of annihilation against the Jews: You don’t know them. The West doesn’t know them. They will not let us live. We must fight for our lives. It costs the world nothing to discuss, discuss, discuss. And the French are whores and will sell them all the weapons they want, and the British too. And who knows about the Americans! And when the Arabs at last have their
Anbar 79 way, perhaps the French and the British will be nice and send ships to evacuate our women and children. (TJB 38) Bellow’s reading of Shahar’s speech is that the Israelis live with “the nightmare of annihilation” (38). Indeed, the Israelis’ fear of annihilation at the hands of Arabs is unreasonable when the Arabs are militarily impotent. The Arabs live under a very tight siege. The Israeli forces allow them no weapons. The Arabs’ only available weapon at that juncture of history is stones. In a conversation with Bellow, Professor Tzvi Lamm of Hebrew University expresses also his fear of annihilation: “The forces opposite us are seeking to destroy us: the moderates, politically; and the extremists, physically” (TJB 70). The recurrent discourse on the Jews’ annihilation not only echoes Bellow’s fear of death but also affirms his bond to his fellows. Their annihilation means the annihilation of his ethnic identity. The Arabs’ aim, actually, is not annihilation of the Jews but liberation from the Jews’ grip. The Arabs have no choice. Indeed, they should not be blamed for their national struggle against the colonizer. They want to preserve their land, identity and independence. To accept the hegemony of the colonizer is unnatural. The colonized people have no means of liberation except violence: “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence” (Fanon 86). Frantz Fanon‘s argument on violence in The Wretched of the Earth sheds light on the significance of violence to the colonized in a way that does not legitimize but explains: But it so happens that for the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. (93) The colonized natives’ violence against the settlers unifies them and molds their character.
Anbar 80 Resistance, identified by the colonizer as violence, thus, effaces differences among colonized individuals. They all have one purpose that is to fight the colonizers. It sustains them psychologically because it enforces positivity and liberates their souls. Under the hegemony of the colonizer, the colonized feels inferior and ineffective but resistance taking the form of violent acts empowers and redeems him. Bellow pictures the Arabs as brutally savage knowing only the language of force. He also cites the speech of Lieutenant General Sa’ad Shazli, who was then the Egyptian Chief of Staff: My sons, officers and men! The Jews have overstepped their bounds in injustices and conceit. And we sons of Egypt have determined to set them back on their heels, and to pry round their positions, killing and destroying so as to wash away the shame of the 1967 defeat and to restore our honor and pride. Kill them wherever you find them and take heed that they do not deceive you, for they are a treacherous people. They may feign surrender in order to gain power over you, and kill you vilely. Kill them and let not compassion or mercy for them seize you. (TJB 143-44) Bellow’s selectiveness of these lines shows his insistence on depicting the Arabs as guilty and aggressive. He picks up an angry and heated speech of a man of war to epitomize the Arab character in order to antagonize the world against the Arabs. Bellow also highlights the speech of the Syrian Minister of Defense, General Mustafa T’Las who promised to reward any soldier who succeeds in killing twenty-eight Jews: “I will cover him with appreciation and honour for his bravery” (TJB 170). Bellow uses the soldier’s logic to picture the Arabs as savages. Yet he does not mention the Israeli massacres committed against the Arabs. Bellow accuses the Arabs of anti-Semitism because they distributed during the war of 1967 in the Sinai desert comic books that, “contained anti-Semitic caricatures of the Nazi type” and because the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion are distributed in Arab countries in large new printings. . .” (TJB 144). These protocols expose the Zionists’ plans for colonization which condemns the Jews. Semitism is a term coined in 1781 by a German linguistic scholar, A. L von
Anbar 81 Schlozer (Shipler 289). The term is derived from the word Shem, one of Noah’s three sons. It was a linguistic designation to Hebrew, Arabic and other languages but in the nineteenth century it expanded to include race. Accordingly, the Arabs and Jews are Semitic nations. Anti-Semitism, however, is used mainly to refer to anti-Jewish sentiments. Webster's Dictionary defines antiSemitism as “opposition to Zionism: sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel.” I believe that anti-Semitism is picked up by Bellow to make the Arab’s national struggle against the Jews appear racially offensive. Actually, when Bellow negates, debases and dehumanizes the Arabs, he should be called anti-Semitic because the Arabs are Semitic nations. They should receive the same sympathy the Jews receive. Pappe demonstrates that the Israeli-Jews used every possible means to prevent expelled Palestinians from coming back to their demolished houses. The Israeli Jews made the lives of the Palestinians worse than death by raping Palestinian women, killing their children, using force, spreading horror, besieging towns, bombing houses and implanting mines in order to stop Palestinians from coming back. After six months of the initiation of Ethnic Cleansing, the mission was fully accomplished. The result was 800,000 displaced Palestinians out of 1 million, 531 demolished villages and 11 evacuated civilian districts (Al-Hayat Ser.1:21). This mechanism is a Zionist terrorism that aims at transferring and displacing Palestinians to prove that Palestine is “a land with no people for people without a land” as the Jews claim. “Ethnic Cleansing” is considered a crime against humanity and deserves punishment according to the International Law. Yet the Jewish ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has never been questioned ethically or politically in a legitimate way. Actually, the Zionist Israelis deserve to be called Nazis because of the horrible crimes they committed and still commit against Arab Palestinians. Jihad Al-Kazin revives the term “Zionnazi.” This term is composed of two syllables “Zion” and “Nazi.” It came as a response to calling the new Arab Conservatives the “Islamic Fascists.” Al-Kazin’s aim is to disturb the Zionists who hate the term “Nazi” because of the Holocaust (36).
Anbar 82 Issac Rabin, Kedourie and Bellow agree that a compromise with the Arabs would be meaningless because they want the Jews out and that any prediction that the Arabs’ modernization would lessen their anger is wrong: Successful modernization would make the Arab states feel strong, and this sense of greatly increased strength might diminish their willingness to resolve the conflict. The process of modernization also causes strains and tensions in societies and their political systems. The disorders resulting from modernization have not made the relations of the Arab states with Israel easier. Of course, the oil strength of the Arabs will diminish as other sources of energy are developed. The oil billionaires make sophisticated industrial purchases, but lack training, skill, and organization. (TJB 144) As evident from the above passage, there is a belief that modernization will not change the Arabs. It will empower them to decline peace with the Israeli Jews. It is harmful to the political system of the Arabs. Underpinning this speech is a wish and maybe an intention, to keep the Arabs away from modernization. This speech also reveals a demeaning essentialist idea of the backwardness and ignorance of the Arabs in spite of their wealth. The Arabs are portrayed as good consumers but not producers. Bellow notes that the economic conditions of Arab refugees living in camps are very good, yet that does not diminish their hostility: “Many of the refugees are employed, and resettled in towns and villages. Economic improvement has not, however, calmed the Arabs. It has, if anything, sharpened their discontents” (TJB 150). Bellow fails to perceive or prefer to ignore the fact that Arabs are discontented because they are refugees. They are denied to return and live on their homeland. He ignores the denial of rights and privileges pertinent to life in refugee camps. The economic improvement Bellow claims does not attend to their basic need for good education, proper work chances, decent transportation means and good medical care.
Anbar 83 To stereotype the Arabs’ resistance as aggression and unconstructiveness mean to sustain the binary distinctions necessary for the colonial system. Harkabi differentiates, “between the older generation of refugees with their longing to recover their land and property, their idyll of the days before the disaster, and the younger generation which has replaced nostalgia with hatred and whose aim is not to recover the lost villages of their fathers but to return as conquerors and masters” (TJB 153). In an essentialist manner, Harkabi seems discontented with both the Arabs’ positive or negative attitudes. Within the colonial system, nationalism is explained as terrorism. Fanon is sympathetically sensitive to the genuine spirit of nationalism and resistance: But the native's guilt is never a guilt which he accepts; it is rather a kind of curse, a sort of sword of Damocles, for, in his innermost spirit, the native admits no accusation. He is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. . . . He is in fact ready at a moment's notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter. The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. (52-53) Arab Palestinians’ defensive mechanism is a natural reflexive behavior per Fanon’s above demonstration. The colonized man wants to feel how it is to be in control. Bellow’s recurrent colonialist discourse that debases the Arabs is a Jewish Zionist propaganda that serves to divert the world’s attention from the real cause: Palestine is occupied by the Jews. Professor Harkabi continues to present a pathetic image of Palestinians: “During the conflict, Palestinian society, which had never been strong, fell apart” (TJB 151). He claims that what destroys Palestinians is that they are not a cohesive nation. He likes to imagine that chaos and lack of union among Palestinians, rather than colonization by the Jews, are the cause of their displacement. He exonerates the Jews from the guilt of displacing Palestinians. He says that rich Palestinians left the country because of “the burden of struggle and sacrifices to the workers, villagers, and middle class. . . . These factors, the collective fear, moral disintegration and chaos in every domain, were what displaced the Arabs. . . ” (TJB 152). Bellow claims that Harkabi “is
Anbar 84 anything but unfeeling towards the Arabs” (TJB 152). It is a confirmation not only of Harkabi’s blind prejudice but also of Bellow’s who approves of his prejudiced ideas. Bellow’s premeditated selection of Harkabi proves that he does not want to be just or objective in his presentation of the Arabs. In fact, Bellow detests being objective: “It is so easy for outsiders to say that there are two sides to the question. What a terrible expression! I am beginning to detest it” (TJB 38). His statement shows ambivalent humanistic stance because it reveals his intention to support one party. He conspicuously considers only one side; the one pertinent to his roots, the Jews. It is a premeditated racism. Bellow’s contradictory presentation provide evidence on his racial colonist ideology; when the Arabs are heated nationalists, he and other characters in this travel account brand them terrorist and extremist. Yet when some Arabs are exhausted by the struggle, they are judged weak. They are condemned any way. Controversy among the Arabs is another negative element interpreted as division and highlighted by Bellow to intensely distort their image. The colonialist language appears in Bellow’s selection of images to portray the Arabs as divided. He has already represented them as uncooperative with the Jews in peace-making but to show them as uncooperative with each other has a more condemning implication. It aims at emphasizing their presumed inferior status and primitive position. Professor Malcom H. Kerr’s opinion of Arabs’ solidarity is that longstanding Western myth holds that the Palestine cause unites the Arab states when they are divided on all else. It would be more accurate to say that when the Arabs are in a mood to cooperate, this tends to find expression in an agreement to avoid action on Palestine, but that when they choose to quarrel, Palestine policy readily becomes a subject of dispute. (TJB 154) According to Kerr, the Arabs are not united as it seems to be. He makes the issue of Arab solidarity a toy to them, which worsens their image. This stereotyping shows a distrust of and
Anbar 85 loathing for the Arabs’ political leadership. In fact, the Jews are frightened of the Arabs’ alliance because that means their most horrible fear; annihilation. Bellow highlights controversy among the Arabs to empower the Jews: “It would be in Israel’s interest to deal with the Arab states separately, says Kedourie. Coalitions are sometimes fatally cumbersome in negotiations” (TJB 145). Although this division among the Arabs is criticized, the Jews prefer it because it promotes their interests. It would be easy for the Jews to destroy the Arabs politically, socially, economically and militarily when they are divided. Bellow turns to Professor Malcom H. Kerr’s book to explain the struggle in 1970 between the Palestinian guerrillas and the army of Jordan’s King. He is being selective of incidents to reflect the Arabs’ division. The Palestinian fedayeen in Amman know only the language of force: “The Jordanian government, after its 1967 defeat, had to accept the various Palestinian resistance groups but tried to control and contain them. Hussein wished to avoid a fight; some of the Palestinian organizations also wished to keep the peace. . . ” (TJB 155). Bellow’s colonialist racialized discourse on the Arabs extends to discredit Arab leaders. He epitomizes the inner struggle among the Arabs in the clash between the revolutionists/ Palestinian guerrillas (Habash and his followers) and Hussein’s Jordanian army. Kerr says that in Hussein’s Jordanian army, they had built up a reservoir of special resentment against the arrogant attitudes of the Palestinians. The political tension was mixed with social difference between the proud men of the tribal background, trained under the paternal eye of the British, whose whole life and livelihood had been based on loyal service to the Hashemite crown, and the slick urbanites, the socially mobile, ideologically facile, irreverent young men who led the resistance movement. . . . In mid-September the Palestinian commandos prepared for a general strike in support of their demands for a purge of Hussein’s regime which would leave the king “with only nominal authority.” This
Anbar 86 reckless Palestinian challenge was too much for Hussein and his army officers. On September 17 the army attacked Palestinians. (TJB 155-56) Corollary to this bloody confrontation between Palestinians and Jordanians: 1)“Hussein’s Bedouins massacred some thirty-six hundred people,” 2) “Some refugees on the East Bank now sought to return to live under Israeli rule rather than remain exposed to the Jordanian army” (TJB 156). Arab rulers are depicted as dictators whereas the Jews as democratic. Kerr believes that the Jordanians’ brutality against the Palestinians in 1970 supersedes that of Moshe Dayan’s in 1967 (TJB 156). In fact, Moshe Dayan is well known for his heartlessness. He was the leader of many organized massacres against Palestinians. In July 1948, he was the leader of Dueima Massacre where people of Dueima were besieged from all boarders except the east to force them move out the village (Elmessiri 7.112). In October 1948, he led Lod Massacre where soldiers were ordered to gun down mercilessly any moving objects: men, women, children, etc… Dead bodies were found scattered the next day (Elmessiri 7.103). Bellow posits a malignant question with regard to the Palestinian/Jordanian conflict: “If this was how Arabs dealt with each other, [Israelis] asked, what treatment was in store for the population of Israel if the Arabs ever got upper hand?” (TJB 156). The underlying implication of this question makes it a statement more than question. The Arabs, Bellow suggests, should be subjugated because they are incompetent to lead. Bellow criticizes the leaderships of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. He pictures Nasser as an evil power because his political decision dragged Israel into war! He attributes Palestinians’ suffering and the war to Nasser showing him as manipulative: “Many Palestinians have suffered greatly, but it was not because of their suffering that Nasser went to war in 1967. Nasser didn’t want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel” (TJB 121). Bellow accuses Nasser of manipulating the Palestinians for his own political purposes. Such derogatory account, of course, creates, in my opinion, a rift among the Arabs and provokes enmity
Anbar 87 that destroys Arabs’ unity. Using Arabs against Arabs is an Israeli Jewish policy that aims at distracting the Arabs’ attention from their real enemies. Bellow believes that Nasser was not strong enough to bear the increasing burden of failure which “brought on his fatal heart attack” (TJB 157). Bellow’s racialized discourse on Nasser undermines the latter’s political policy. It shows him as incapable. It undermines his victory of nationalizing the Suez Canal (1956) and his challenge of superpowers. Nasser worked towards independence, development, solidarity, military strength of Arab countries and freedom from colonialism. He had been alert to the colonialist purposes of superpowers. The Jews hated Nasser because he expelled them from Aqaba. His nationalization of Aqaba is a tender wound to the Jews as well as to superpowers: “Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the government of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open” (TJB 121). His act is an economic blow to superpowers. Arrogantly, an Israeli general has earlier said to Janowitz as they stood together on the bank of the Suez Canal: “We expect to hold this for the next fifty years” (TJB 169). Nasser negated their imperialist dream and defied their ego. Bellow’s negative representation of the Arabs is a typical colonialist attitude. This representation conforms to Fanon’s ironic depiction of the native as viewed by the colonizer in the colonial world: The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. (41)
Anbar 88 Fanon’s words epitomize Bellow’s representation of the Arabs. Bellow’s colonialist discourse negates, denies, debases and stereotypes the Arab natives. He depicts them as synonymous with brutality, aggressiveness, barbarism, primitivism, immorality and meanness. Bellow allows no Arab to represent or present himself in To Jerusalem and Back. Mahmud Abu Zuluf is the only Arab character mentioned in this account. In a very Zionist practice, Bellow determinately shuts out the native Arabs. His favoritism of Abu Zuluf, editor of El Kuds newspaper, is due to Abu Zuluf’s presumed moderation, a moderation that accepts the hegemony of the Jewish Israeli colonizer. Abu Zuluf believes that Israel should urge the peace process before the Arabs become strong: The Arabs are continually gaining strength while Israel becomes weaker. . . . More war, more men lost, more dependency upon your country. While the Arab nations become richer, more modern, more influential. No, Israel must come forward quickly with peace plans and initiate negotiations, show a willingness to negotiate. (TJB 36) Abu Zuluf’s faith in Israel ability to initiate peace and his criticism of the Arabs’ exploitation of Israel are reasons why Bellow gives him a voice in this account. This negation strategy allows Bellow’s imagination to become irrational in debasement of the Arabs. It aims at “clearing a space for the expansion of the colonial imagination and for the pursuit of desire” (Spurr 92). It is symbolic of the nothingness of the “Others.” To Bellow, the Arabs are nothing politically, socially and psychologically. While excluding the Arabs’ voice from the account despite geographical and political pertinence, Bellow gives a voice to America, a country located thousands of miles away from Jerusalem the sight of action in this travel account, and the political upheaval it depicts. He describes America as “the prime revolutionary country” (TJB 13), presenting it as a peace-maker and a super democratic entity. He highlights it as an impressive superpower on several occasions: In 1947, Miles Copeland, an American public-relation expert, had been sent to Damascus in order
Anbar 89 to “liberalize their political system” (TJB 11). There is also the American intervention to revolutionize the inefficient Syrian election system which has failed. In 1952— during Nasser’s reign— Kermit Roosevelt, an American public relation expert, was in Egypt to mobilize democracy and enhance creating a stable middle class in Palestine. America’s democracy is juxtaposed against the Arabs’ presumed despotism. It is introduced to condemn the Arabs. It is intended to show America aware of the Arabs’ lack of democracy and enhance Bellow’s presentation. Bellow glorifies the USA because it is a great ally of Israel. Mr. Abba Eban, a member in the Knesset, commends America’s support of the Jews and its superiority: “He says that the relations between Israel and the United States have never been better. Israel is receiving more aid from America in this period than in all the years since it was founded. . . . America already had the upper hand” (TJB 40). Bellow says it is “plain enough” (TJB 103) that the United States is indispensible to Israel because it plays approvingly the role of the peace-maker for the sake of the Israeli Jews. Morris Janowitz, Bellow’s university colleague points out that “it has from the first been America’s policy to protect Israel. Without American approval and help Israel would never have come into existence. And the Americans have claimed, for some time now, that only they can bring peace to the Middle East” (166). The existence of Israel as a state depends greatly on American support. America backs Israel in all its actions. The Zionists in turn are controlling the government of the United States. The Congress and Senate House are saturated with Zionist Jews members. They are the decision-makers. In an article in 1975, Joseph Alsop, a great friend to Israel, points out the significance of the interrelated fate of Israel and America: Any American must always put American interests first, so I’ve thought a lot about the way Israel affects American interests. Some of the effects have been adverse, rather obviously, as in the area of American relations with the Arab world. Yet such considerations are heavily outweighed, in my opinion, as soon as you apply the acid test to Israel-American relationship. It is a macabre test. Because of Israel’s
Anbar 90 perilous national situation, we American always have to think about how America would be affected by Israel’s actual destruction. (TJB 98-99) Alsop’s speech implies that America’s good relation with the Arab countries should not upset Israel because what America fears foremost in the long run is the annihilation of the Israeli Jews. The Israeli Jews need not worry because: “The only other choice for the Arabs is to leave their oil in the ground” (TJB 20). American-Arab relations are presumably based on economic dependence on superpower. American-Israeli relations are supposedly more humanistic and, therefore, more stable. Alsop confirms the necessity of Israel existence to the existence of America: “Hence I have long believed that we Americans must assure Israel’s survival, if only to assure the survival to those American values that I cherish most” (TJB 99). In fact, the relationship between America and Israel is premised on common interests; political and economic domination of Middle East. Each wants to be a superpower. So rather than fight each other, they create alliance to dominate the Middle East. Noam Chomsky believes that America’s support of Israel is based on Israel’s military victory over the Arabs: In 1967 Israel won a dramatic military victory, demonstrated its military power, in fact, smashed up the entire Arab world, and that won great respect. A lot of Americans, especially privileged Americans, love violence and want to be on the side of the guy with the gun, and here was a powerful, violent state that smashed up its enemies and demonstrated that it was the dominant military power in the Middle East, put those Third World upstarts in their place. (5) He believes that the Jews’ violence is what attracts Americans. Third world is a pejorative term used, “as a general metaphor for any underdeveloped society or social condition anywhere” (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts 232). In the post-colonial context, it expands beyond the economic or social dimension to include racial, culture, military and epistemological forms.
Anbar 91 Bellow’s Manichean colonialist ideology dehumanizes the Pro-Arabs. He criticizes those who side with the Arabs such as Marshall Hodgson, Bellow’s colleague at the University of Chicago, as well as the intellectual spokesman of France Jean-Paul Sartre. Hodgson is sympathetic with the Arabs because the establishment of a Jewish state necessitated violent practices against them. Bellow accuses Hodgson of ignorance and antiZionism because he views the Jews as oppressors and invaders: He was romantic about Islam. He told me, and probably was right, that I didn’t understand . Though he once wrote me a letter saying that he wanted to join the
Mississippi civil-rights marches, he had no sympathy whatever with Zionism. After the war of 1967 he cried out, “You have no business in Arab lands, you Jews!” In the heat of argument he then said many rash things. Of course few people do understand the complexities of Arab history, and it made Marshall frantic when he saw a pattern of Western political ideas being imposed ignorantly on the Middle East. But he knew as little about Jews as I did about Arabs. Nation-states have seldom if ever been created without violence and injustice. Hodgson believed that the Jews had behaved as though the Arabs were an inferior, colonial sort of people and not heirs of a great civilization. Of course the Arabs had themselves come as conquerors, many centuries ago. But one didn’t present such argument to Marshall. The Arabs were his people. He failed to understand what Israel meant to the Jews. It wasn’t that the Jews didn’t matter—he was a Quaker and a liberal, a man of human sentiments—but that he didn’t know quite how they mattered. (TJB 109) Bellow’s contention and criticism of Hodgson’s sympathy with the Arabs discloses his most racist attitude against them. He disregards the Arabs for the sake of the Jews. Bellow is totally indifferent to the Arabs. He knows little about them. His knowledge of them is that they are outsiders and intruders. This indifference, I believe, reveals that his humanistic values are selective. Paradoxically, he naturalizes the Jews’ violence and injustice in their colonization of
Anbar 92 Palestine whereas he continuously criticizes the Arabs’ violence and dehumanizes them because they are using violence to resist the colonizer Jews. His colonialist discourse naturalizes violence when it is for Israeli Jews. They only have the sovereign right to use force to establish a state and defend themselves and when Palestinians reply in violence, Bellow objects. He believes his double standard is quite legitimate. Saul Bellow is also anti- French because the French press supports the Arabs. He calls France anti-Semitic because it does not support Israel in its colonization of Palestine: “The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment were decidedly anti-Semitic” because “[s]ince 1973, Le Monde has openly taken the side of the Arabs in their struggle with Israel. It supports terrorists. It
is friendlier to Amin than to Rabin” (TJB 9). Bellow’s double standard is again in operation here. If the Palestinians defend their existence, land and identity, it is terrorism to Bellow. Israeli nationalism is permissible but not Palestinians’. The French also are accused of promoting antiSemitic sentiments in some Arab countries: “In the thirties, the Nazis won considerable support in the Middle East, earlier French anti-Dreyfusards had spread anti-Semitism in Syria and Lebanon, where French culture was esteemed” (TJB 144). Bellow accuses France of not being as democratic and civilized as it pretends to be because it does not support Israel: France is a country whose thinkers, sitting in Paris, feel they know all that they need to know about the world outside. That outside world is what they declare it to be . . . Paris for centuries the center of European civilization, grew rich in collective representations, in the indispensible images or views by which the civilized world conceived of itself. . . . If France cared anything about liberal democracy, about freedom, it would behave differently toward Israel, which alone represents freedom in the Middle East. But it prefers Arab feudalism, Arab socialism, Chinese communism. It prefers doing business with the Third World. (TJB 51)
Anbar 93 It is clear from the above lines that Bellow strives to undermine French civilization and knowledge. He accuses it of false democracy and lack of freedom because it does not support the Jewish cause. He dislikes France favoritism of the Arabs. Sympathy with the opponents of the state of Israel is not to be forgiven. He is becoming more at ease in his use of derogatory labels such as “Third world” to refer to the Arabs. Bellow’s essentialist idea of the superiority of the Israeli and the inferiority of Arabs creates a Manichean colonial world of domination and subordination. He is so indignant on Le Monde because of its criticism and negative remarks on the Israeli raid undertaken to free the hostages of Entebbe in 1976. The Entebbe hijacking incident was said to have been carried out by Palestinians. Actually, it is revealed in “British Information: Israeli Intelligences is Behind Operation of Entebbe in 1976” that it was a Zionist attempt to frame Palestinians: The Israeli officials alleged that the Palestinians hijacked an Air France plane with 229 passengers—including 83 Israelis—from Tel Aviv to Entebbe in Uganda. The Zionist propaganda promulgated that the Israeli Intelligence rescued heroically all passengers and killed the hijackers. But a recent release of British confidential documents reveals that Israel was behind the hijacking conspiracy in order to force France to change it sympathetic policy towards the Middle East (Al-Hayat 16129. 14:(2 June 2007) Bellow’s bias with regard to this incident exposes his racist ideology. Bellow attacks in To Jerusalem and Back the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre because Sartre is being reasonable and logical in his approach to the Palestinian-Jewish cause. Although “Sartre expresses great sympathy with Israel” (TJB 120), Bellow is not happy with Sartre’s balanced statement that attempt to do justice to the Arabs as well. He wants blind support for Israel and expects Sartre to oblige.
Anbar 94 Sartre is characterized by Bellow as a left-wing intellectual who embraces the MarxistLeninist values. He criticizes Sartre because of his belief that the Israeli Jews initiated the war against the Arabs: Sartre goes on to chide those who claim that the Arabs started the war of 1967. And here the suspicion bred by his carefree analysis of the Israeli economy and the support of Israel by imperialist-minded Jews in the United States can no longer be repressed, and I ask myself: Did this influential thinker and prominent revolutionist know what he was saying? President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the [UN] peacekeeping forces that Israel had no choice but to fight. (TJB 121) Bellow dislikes Sartre because he condemns the Jews for initiating the 1967 war. Bellow blames the Arabs for the war. He believes that the Arabs forced the Jews into war not the other way around, and therefore he does not like Sartre defending the Arabs and his sympathy with them. He quotes Sartre in To Jerusalem and Back: Those who claim the Arabs started the war [of 1967], that they are criminals, forget to consider the situation of the Palestinians, the absolutely insufferable situation of the Palestinians. They also forget that the Arabs from the beginning have been led by British maneuvers to take a negative attitude towards Israel, an attitude which persisted since 1948, when an idiotic war was provoked. (121) He believes that Sartre burdens Israel by referring to the injustice it has put upon the Arabs. He prejudicially reacts: “But Sartre and others apparently want the Jews to be exceptionally exceptional. Perhaps the Jews have themselves created such expectations. Israel has made extraordinary efforts to be democratic, equitable, reasonable, capable of change” (TJB 127). Bellow exaggerates the superiority of Israel. He wonders why such demands are not requested from the Arabs, saying: “Israel occupies about one-sixth of one percent of the lands you call Arab. Isn’t it possible to adjust the tradition of Islam—to reinterpret, to change emphasis, so as to accept
Anbar 95 this trifling occupancy? A great civilization should be capable of human and generous flexibility” (128). Bellow mistakenly calls Islam a tradition and accuses it of intolerance. He wants human intervention to change Islam. In fact, all demands and pressures are made upon the Arabs not the Israelis. He hopes Sartre to convince the Arabs to give up their national struggle under the pretext that the “destruction of Israel will do [the Arabs] no good. Let the Jews live in their small state. . . In any case, Sartre had not said such things” (TJB 128). Bellow wants to impose his colonialist thinking on Sartre. He cannot forgive Sartre because he favors the presence of the Arabs over the Jews in an international conference. He quotes Sartre: “You cannot invite both Israelis and Arabs to an international conference. You can’t because the Arabs don’t want it.” Sartre’s logic is that to invite Israelis “means not inviting the Arabs.” He finds that unacceptable because the Arabs “are politically big” (TJB 123, 24). The Arabs’ hearts are hardened from the way they are treated by their enemy that they cannot be in the same room with their oppressors. Bellows’ reaction to Sartre’s logic is that Sartre cannot afford to “disregard” the Arabs (TJB 124). Sartre’s objectivity does not please Bellow’s double standards. The Jews’ positivity is highly evaluated when Bellow discusses Sartre’s ideology with regard to the Jews. Bellow flares because of the demand Sartre and others put upon Israel, so he lists the beneficiary acts by the Jews done to the Arabs: In Hitler’s Europe, they [Jews] were led to slaughter; in 1948, the survivors became formidable fighters. Landless in exile, they turned into farmers. The Mamlukes had decreed the Palestinian coastal plain should be a desert; they made a garden of it. Obviously, the Jews accepted a historic responsibility to be exceptional. They have held to this; they have held themselves to it. Now the question is whether more cannot be demanded from other peoples. On the others, no such demands are made. (TJB 127)
Anbar 96 According to Bellow, the Jews translated their suffering at the hands of Nazis into success. They became farmers. They freed Palestine from Mamlukes’ occupation and control to colonize it themselves for honorable reasons: the claim of “historic responsibility to be exceptional.” They are committed to be exceptional where no other people are. Bellow accuses Sartre of detachment because he does not support the Israeli Jews as he believes he should do: “When I read Sartre on the Jewish question, I am less surprised by the remoteness of this grand juror’s mind” (TJB 127). I find, however, Sartre’s stance regarding the Palestinian-Jewish cause fair and objective. Sartre’s objectivity, in my opinion, stimulates Bellow to attack him. It is in Bellow’s nature to dislikes objectivity. He not only admits earlier that he knows little about the Arabs (109), he concludes his memoir by indicating unwillingness to know them: “We outsiders are the despair of the Arabists. We cannot free ourselves from our Western myths about the Muslim world. Even to use the term ‘Arab’ convicts us of ignorance” (TJB 154). It is a premeditated ignorance and discrimination. He refuses to know the Arabs. He and others are saturated with demeaning essentialist ideas about the Arabs and wish not to change that. He prefers to depict the Arabs on the basis of others’ accounts and his own fantasy. He also indicts the ProArabs of romanticism, enthusiasm and falsification: “The true state of things in the Middle East is difficult to explain to people who can never hope to rid themselves of their romancing habit of mind and their partisan or ideological distortion” (TJB 154). In light of this, he prejudicially declines to acknowledge the “Other” or see that “Other” acknowledged by somebody else. Because Bellow probes the Palestinian-Jewish cause solely through the eyes of Israeli Jews thinkers, his representation of the Arabs is considered a reproduction of these thinkers’ essentialist ideas and his fantasy about the Arabs. Moreover, his insistence not to know the Arabs puts his credibility in question. Said, also, distrusts Bellow’s credibility for the same reason. He says that Bellow and others who visited Israel had “a talk with an expert who represented the Arab ‘reality’ to them, alleviated their concern for human values, and reassured them about Israeli democracy. . . .
Anbar 97 Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back gets its force precisely from this accepted, legitimated sort of representation” (The Question of Palestine 41). The Israeli-Jewish and Zionist intellectuals provided Bellow with an idealized image of Israel, an image that lessens his humanistic concern for the “Other.” His deliberate selection of specific Jewish intellectuals to articulate the most hostile things about the Palestinian question reinforces his prejudice against the Arabs and demonstrates his bias. Bellow infuses overtly in To Jerusalem and Back his personal points of view on several social, ideological and political issues. The non-fictional journal form of this work not only “allows Bellow to move from one subject to the next without sustaining an argument” (Bach et al, 223), but also to voice his vision and express himself freely with regards to these issues. His location in the text is strategic. To Jerusalem and Back possesses a strong authorial voice. Bellow is the protagonist in this personal account. He interviews, comments and judges. Bellow assumes the nomadic traveler role travelling with a pre-notion about the place he is visiting: “Sightseeing is all very well, but our heads are full of news, omens, and speculations” (TJB 105). His real purpose of travelling into Jerusalem is colonialist: “I was here to observe, to sense a condition or absorb qualities” (TJB 111). The purpose of his trip is to: scrutinize, grasp and feel. These acts fall under the umbrella of the colonial gaze. His colonialist gaze is more ideological and political than physical. Edward Said illustrates further the nature of this penetrating gaze when the Orient is the subject of gazing: “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or—as the colonial power openly coveted their territory—taken over” (Orientalism 207). In the colonial world, the colonialist gaze objectifies the colonized people and views them as troubles. It masters them and forms them according to the colonizer’s desire. This is exactly how Bellow views the Palestinians. The personal nature of this work affirms Bellow’s affinity with his fellow Jews. His Journey to Jerusalem is a journey to himself; a reunion with his ethnic identity. It is very true that: “Every page evinces Bellow’s passionate concern for the survival of Israel . . .” (Bach et al, 224).
Anbar 98 The word “passionate,” however, should be replaced with “prejudiced.” Bellow concurrently refers to himself in To Jerusalem and Back as an “insider” (15) and “outsider” (7,154). Bellow’s paradoxical sense of belonging and non-belonging emphasizes the difficulty of his ethnic adjustment and disavowal of marginalization. In spite of his strong Jewish ethnic identity, he views himself as an outsider, yet he presents the Jews in Israel from the point of view of an insider. This ambivalent position of being simultaneously an outsider and insider is typical of the marginal man. Everett V. Stonequist characterizes the marginal man as someone who, “is poised in the psychological uncertainty between two (or more) social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies , repulsion and attraction of these worlds, one of which is often ‘dominant’ over the other; within which membership is implicitly if not explicitly based upon the birth or ancestry (race or nationality); and where exclusion removes the individual from a system of group relation” (8). Bellow’s problem of ethnic adjustment is best described in this context. His fluctuation between American and Jewish ethnicity shows his fear of marginalization and his subconscious need to cling to his roots. Bellows defends throughout the text the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. He is a racist Zionist because of his support of a Jewish-Zionist state in Palestine. His topic is a disputable land, a land that is inhabited concurrently by the Palestinians and Jews. This land represents identity to both. To the Palestinians, it is a primordial identity. To the Jews, it is a recently acquired identity. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth links the land with self-esteem: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (44). The native’s self-esteem is related to his possession of his land. He is robbed of his dignity when he is robbed of his land. Charles D. Cremeans describes in The Arabs and the World the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict as, “a great historical tragedy, a clash of cultures, of aspirations, of irresponsible hopes, and of the bitter hatred” (180). The Palestinian-Jewish cause is deeply rooted in history. The relation between these two nations is multifaceted. Bellow’s presentation seems to ignore the dialectical
Anbar 99 and complex historical relation between the Arabs and Jews by focusing on the Jews. There are two different nations that exist on the same holy land, a problematic land. Their coexistence does not mean necessarily that they are capable of peacefully integrating or harmonizing. There are national, cultural, ideological, colonial and religious dimensions to their conflict. Such a conflict creates resistance on both sides in a way that impedes any sort of comprise. In To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow gives vent to his racism without feelings he has to mask it. He takes an extremist opponent position in regard to the Arabs. Bellow prejudicially calls the Arabs terrorist, extremist and fundamentalist because they are revolutionary nationalist. He equates their national consciousness with cannibalism and terrorism. Discrimination is manifest in stereotyping the Arabs by designating special demeaning attributes to them. On the one hand, he refuses to admit the suffering of Palestinians as a nation who has been displaced, denied, occupied, marginalized, silenced and oppressed by the Zionist Jews. On the other hand, he pictures the Israelis as poor victims of the Palestinians’ aggression. Bellow’s belief that the Jews are different from and better than others makes him a racist. Bellow is an amalgam of contradictory forces because of his biased humanism and the change in his racialized discourses from covert in Henderson the Rain King to overt in To Jerusalem and Back. For some reasons Saul Bellow’s need to use a mask to hide his racism and ethnic prejudice against certain nations is not existent in To Jerusalem and Back. He did not attempt to be objective as he is openly hostile to the Arabs. Bellow misuses documentation to back up his vilification of Arabs and Palestinians. I will attempt in the next chapter to account for the change in Bellow’s colonialist writing from covert in Henderson the Rain King to overt in To Jerusalem and Back.
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Conclusion The stream of racism and prejudice against the Africans and Arabs which runs throughout Henderson the Rain King (1959) and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) contradicts Saul Bellow’s humanistic claims. This stream marks Bellow as a racist. In many ways, a postcolonial reading of Bellow’s two works helps expose his presumed humanistic presentation which demeans the Africans and Arabs of Palestine, in favor of the Americans and the Jews. It discloses his colonialist ideology. This ideology is caused by a personal ethnic identity crisis. Saul Bellow, indeed, is caught between two cultures and identities: Americanism and Jewishness. He oscillates between his American and Jewish identity in these two works, separated by a span of seventeen years. He sets out on a quest of identity. The quest reveals an inferiority complex that tries to hide behind American identity in the first work yet embraces Jewishness in the second. James Atlas’s contradictory views of Bellow’s ethnicity are quite illuminating in this regard. Atlas says that Bellow’s status as an outsider is essential to him but simultaneously stressful: “Being a Jew, like being a novelist, confirmed Bellow’s status as an outsider, a member of still another beleaguered minority . . .” (Bellow 248). He reiterates the fundamentality of Bellow’s Jewish ethnicity: “He clung to his origins the way he clung to his neuroses; to leave them behind would be to alter his fundamental nature” (Bellow 294). Atlas indirectly refers to this fact as a reason behind Bellow’s poor assimilation into the American culture. Israel, Atlas observes, evokes in Bellow a profound feeling of identification: “However vehemently he maintained that he was an American writer who happened to be a Jew, Bellow identified strongly and publicly with the fate of his people,” the Jews (Bellow 369). Atlas prioritizes Bellow’s Jewish ethnicity, saying that Bellow, although American, is more of a Jew than American. In spite of that Atlas finds Bellow’s two identities equally balanced: “For Bellow, the tragic history of the Jews was inscribed in his soul, but so was an American habit of skepticism and
Anbar 101 independence” (Bellow 401). In fact, Atlas also asserts at the end of the biography that Bellow is as much of a Jew as an American. Atlas’s fluctuation can be explained as an attempt to avoid controversy with regard to Bellow’s identity. But more significantly, one cannot avoid observing Bellow’s inner ethnic struggle and maladjustment with Americanism. The powerful eminence of Bellow’s Jewish ethnicity in To Jerusalem and Back supersedes to a large extent the American in Henderson the Rain King. The same can be said about his racial ideology and colonial discourse. They become manifest and daring in To Jerusalem and Back in comparison to that in Henderson the Rain king. Bellow does not attempt to conceal his antipathy towards the Arabs in To Jerusalem and Back. His presentation of the Palestinian-Jewish cause shows an image of the Arabs as victimizers and the Israeli Jews as victims. Henderson the Rain King shows Bellow’s assimilation into the American culture whereas To Jerusalem and Back, in fact, proves it is a poor assimilation because Bellow cannot escape his essentialist self as a Jew. A reading of Bellow’s character helps justify his contradictory modes of representations in these works. Atlas’s Bellow provides a significant insight into Bellow’s character. First: “Bellow’s self-dramatizing impulse, so crucial to his development as a writer, grew out of a need to make himself heard” (43). This need arises from his feeling that he is rejected by his family in general and his father in particular. He did not receive enough attention or affection from his father who was busy all the time. Besides, his elder brothers disregarded him considering him a child. Bellow, thus, needed attention. Therefore, Bellow writes for Bellow. “It was as if he was writing to just one person: himself” (Bellow 282). He writes for self-gratification. He arrogantly shows disrespect to his colleagues: “Writers who posed a threat to Bellow’s hegemony got the cold shoulder; writers who occupied a place safely below his own on the literary ladder were seen as comrades in the ‘travail business,’ as Bellow liked to refer to his profession” (Bellow 277). Bellow is disrespectful of others. He is contemptuous of critics. He undermines them: “His growing fame hadn’t diminished his sensitivity to criticism; reviewers were ‘jokers,’ ‘rats’”(Bellow 276). His egocentric character makes everything revolve around him. This self-centeredness is not different
Anbar 102 from that of the colonizer who wants to affirm narcissistically his superiority through control and hegemony. Though writing to himself, Bellow did not want to provoke readers at the beginning of his writing career. Yet when he felt secure as a writer his reservation evaporated: “As Bellow’s reputation increased so did his self-assurance as a literary commentator” (Bellow 312). A manifest antipathy towards Africans at the beginning of his career might have diminished his popularity when he desperately needed it. An overt antipathy towards the Arabs seventeen years later is no threat. Besides, wining the Nobel Prize gave him eminence, confidence and power to be more daring in his colonialist ideology. Moreover, provoking readers after winning their admiration is likely to give him further fame. To Jerusalem and Back might also be considered a warrior’s rest. It is a chance for Bellow to take a rest from struggling between his two identities, the American and the Jewish. He voluntarily drops his mask to reunite with his Jewish ethnicity regardless of consequences. He became exhausted from struggling with being and becoming, and therefore decided to be himself. His crisis of identity is reflected in his creation of the racial “Other” to reach certainty about his identity. Bellow imagines the Africans and the Arabs as having certain characteristic. His discourse on them works to obliterate the natives’ individuality by collective identification of their characters and biological features. Bellow’s vehicle for racial colonialist discourse is “othering” and stereotyping. His ethnography (direct observation/the way people are represented) is essential to his colonialist discourse on Africa and its people because it plays an important role in creating colonial dichotomies; object/subject and savage/civilized. It locates observed subjects in a racialized way that objectifies them. He presents Africa as a place of political immaturity, hygiene problems, savage and idle people. According to Bellow’s ethnography, Africa is primitive and epidemic. It is a place beyond history, geography and civilization. The wild African nature and hot weather are emphasized. African people are portrayed as savage, barbarous, underdeveloped economically and
Anbar 103 politically. Pejorative words are attached to the black man in Bellow’s colonial language to maximize racial difference and eliminate heterogeneity of the Africans. His excessive egocentrism and paradoxical feelings with regards to the Africans affirms his crisis of identity. Bellow uses Africa to assess and assimilate into the American culture by indirectly comparing American civilization with that of Africa. The construction of cultural and racial boundaries is necessary to his identity formation and his colonial representation in travel narratives. Bellow’s racial scenario of stereotyping and othering recurs with the Palestinians. Palestine is placed in a binary opposition to Israel. The image of the Arabs as backward and violent people contradicts that of the Jews as civilized victims. The Jews are stereotyped in a positive sense. The Israeli Jews are represented as a suffering nation who is persecuted by the colonized Palestinians. Unflinchingly, he turns the Jews from victimizer to victimized. In spite of the diversity of Jewish intellectuals’ views, they all agree on the right of Israel to exist. Israel, according to the Jews’ rhetoric, has the right to exist on the land of Palestine because they were persecuted by Nazis. Yet, according to Arabs’ rhetoric: Israel has no right to exist on their land. Thus, Bellow condemns the Palestinians’ anger at and resistance of the Zionist Jews colonization. He presents Palestinians as a lasting threat, accusing them of holding anti-Semitic sentiments against the Jews. The pro-Arabs also are harshly criticized for their kind feeling towards the Arabs. Travel functions as Saul Bellow’s vehicle to reach an understanding of himself and certainty about his identity. Bellow’s method of selectiveness and ordering of events in his travel operates on the basis of racist binary oppositions: civilized/primitive and human/savage. In the Manichean colonial world there is no escape from dichotomy. The binary structure emphasizes the relation of hegemony and racism. The image of the Arab Palestinians and the Africans as the “Other” emerges within this binary system. The concept of otherness is a necessity to Bellow’s racial representation. Therefore, postcolonialism is the best answer to his racialized discourse. It is a fit context for reading To Jerusalem and Back and Henderson the Rain King to expose Bellow’s racialized discourse and its place in Colonialist Literature.
Anbar 104 The scope of this study, unfortunately, does not allow time or space to deal with Bellow’s other works. Indeed, Bellow’s colonialist attitude in these two works and its diverse manifestations should draw attention to his other works to investigate their colonialist ethos. His works should be re-evaluated in a postcolonial light to undermine his biased humanistic values and expose his colonialist ideology.
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