Splatters of Poetry

beyond poetry

Ok, just a disclaimer. This is going to be another one of my
I-just-got-back-from-an-english-lecture-and-now-I'm-all-excited kind of blogs. You've been warned.

I am currently reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. TFA (as I will henceforth refer to the book because I am too bloody lazy to keep typing the whole title) is a novel about the Igbo people set in Nigeria and published in 1958, at the imposition of colonial rule. Ok so, since I haven't exactly finished the book (don't hate me Mack, it will be finished by seminar- I swear) I am not going to write about the plot of TFA. I am going to write about something a lot scarier than fiction: me.

Today in lecture we talked about how we always base our conceptions of foreign things and foreign places on what we already know. On something we can relate to. Now Hugh Hodges started off the lecture by talking about bananas. He showed us a photo of bunches of bananas and talked about how we always display them with the stem up (because that's the way things are supposed to grow, right?) even though they actually grow the other way round. He said that this is a good metaphor for the way north americans and europeans like to view Africa, by putting it into boxes of things that we understand.

Now I have to say that until very recently, I have never devoted very much grey-matter to thinking about Africa. Africa was only poetry to me. Something strange and foreign beyond the horizion of my imagination. Some place hot with flat trees and women dancing in brightly coloured cloth. Africa was something I did not understand; something I still do not understand. Now I don't want to be racist or ethnocentric here (gotta love university for teaching us big fancy words like that, eh?) but my question is: how can I not? I know that we humans are all the same no matter how wide our noses are or what we eat for lunch; but this kind of knowing is all savoir and no connaitre. I want to understand Africa, I really do. But I want to understand it in a way that does not strip it of its dignity, reducing it to some romanticized fantasy-land where I can indulge my own ignorance. I desperately want to do this, but I do not know how.

Suggestions?

posted by Erin @ 7:55 AM