intertribal: (east indian girl)
intertribal ([personal profile] intertribal) wrote2008-11-17 02:06 pm
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every day, every hour, wish that I was bulletproof

So I had a really intense Colonial Encounters class and for the past couple hours I've just been shaking and trying not to vomit.  I don't think I even articulated my point clearly in class because I was so upset. 

Oddly enough, it took me a couple years to make the connection between Season of Migration to the North and my own family.  

"As it turns out Mustafa was also a precocious student educated in the west but simultaneously harbors a violently hateful and complex relationship with his western identity and acquaintances. The story of Mustafa's troubled past in Europe and in particular his love affair with a British woman, forms the center of the novel. What the narrator then discovers about the stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, awakens in him great curiosity, despair and anger, as Mustafa emerges as his doppelganger. The stories of Mustafa's past life in England, and the repercussions on the village around him, take a toll on the narrator, who is driven to the very edge of sanity. It is only finally, floating in the river Nile, precariously between life and death, that the narrator makes the conscious choice to rid himself of Mustafa's lingering presence, and to stand as an influential individual in his own right."

Mustafa kills his British wife, by the way.  He's in Sudan because he just got out of prison for stabbing her to death - something she "challenged" him to do.  

[identity profile] royinpink.livejournal.com 2008-11-17 10:39 pm (UTC)(link)
???? i'm lost...

[identity profile] intertribal.livejournal.com 2008-11-17 10:41 pm (UTC)(link)
We were discussing whether it was possible for individuals to transcend colonial/postcolonial boundaries, whether it was possible for a relationship between a black man and a white woman to ever be not about that, etc.

[identity profile] royinpink.livejournal.com 2008-11-17 11:21 pm (UTC)(link)
do you not believe it is?

[identity profile] intertribal.livejournal.com 2008-11-17 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes - but all the things we've been reading/watching and several of the people who contributed to discussion said it's not possible.

[identity profile] royinpink.livejournal.com 2008-11-17 11:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Jeez. that's depressing. i mean, i would agree that it's more complicated than some people like to think (people who are like, we can just be race-blind), but reducing people to that, just...it's like destroying anything good about humanity. pure social determinism all the way. fuck that.

[identity profile] intertribal.livejournal.com 2008-11-18 12:07 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah. I talked to my mom about it, and that made me feel better - although of course I wish I could also talk to my dad about it. It was just very jarring to hear. I hate the idea that postcolonialism can't end, and I don't like to think that my parents were always separated by this great, uncrossable cultural gulf, or worse, that their relationship was tied up with political identity and social power that just disguised itself as love.

[identity profile] royinpink.livejournal.com 2008-11-18 12:30 am (UTC)(link)
the sort of questions i ask myself whenever i fall in love...really i just disturb myself the hell away from love. i feel like desire is more prey to that than real love and respect, because desire (of some sort...) is way too much about what the other person's identity says about you...

[identity profile] intertribal.livejournal.com 2008-11-18 12:41 am (UTC)(link)
I would probably agree with that. But... you know how I have a good perception of my parents' relationship, so I've always believed that real love and respect do exist and are possible.