Just Jake

Jake Highton is a journalism professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno. He teaches media law, history of journalism and advanced reporting. Highton is the author of numerous books, including "Nevada Newspaper Days." He writes a weekly column for the Daily Sparks Tribune.

Name:
Location: United States

Monday, March 30, 2009

Loneliness lauded, colonialism decried

Capsule reviews of books recently crossing this columnist’s desk:

“The Best of Grammaticus.” Writings of Professor E.M. Blaiklock. Edited by David More. Wilson & Horton, Auckland, New Zealand. 1994.
It is doubtful whether more than five out of 300 million Americans ever heard of E.M. Blaiklock. Which is a pity.
Blaiklock, whose penname was Grammaticus, was an essayist of the type that no longer exists in this noisy, cluttered, fast-paced, Digital Age. His columns appeared in the New Zealand press for more than 40 years.
His style was simplicity personified: soft, gentle, thoughtful, wise, literary and historical. He was “a thinking reed,” in Pascal’s phrase. Un homme sérieux. Blaiklock, a professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Auckland, wrote with a clarity and brevity that is beyond most academics. His interests were broad. He easily discussed Housman, Dickens, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Tennyson, Kipling, Masefield, FitzGerald, Carlyle and Hans Christian Anderson.
Poetry pleased him, quoting it often. “But where are the snows of yesteryear” (Villon). “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (Shakespeare).
Grammaticus wrote: “Poetry sometimes reaches truth by a shorter path than prose.” He extolled “the blessings of solitude.” “Something has died in the soul of a man when to be alone is terrifying or irksome,” he wrote. “I see no disadvantage in being an only child and no harm in loneliness…I have always enjoyed work and can imagine no fate worse than to be denied absorbing activity.”
On seeing a spider’s web, he observed: “It was a structure of wondrous symmetry and beauty. There are few sights so remarkable in nature.” On academic meetings: “It has been my fate to sit weary hours in committee meetings which, if wordiness is an indication, some seemed, incomprehensively, to enjoy.” (So true. Take it from an academic who detests time-wasting faculty meetings with their endless talk, talk, talk.) Grammaticus, who died in 1983, loved literature, nature and intellectual jousting. Such a man is never really lonely.

“Black Skin, White Masks” (1952) and “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). By Frantz Fanon. Grove Press, New York.
“Black Skin” outlines the psychological damage inflicted on colonized people, especially inferiority complexes. Just as Frederick Douglass, great American abolitionist, knew that plantation owners tried to keep slaves from learning to read and write, so Fanon noted that “the black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched.”
Or: “When a black man speaks of Marx, the first reaction is: ‘We educated you and now you are turning against your benefactors. Ungrateful wretches.’ ”
Fanon pointed out about racism: “The collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths and collective attitudes of a particular group.” It is cultural, an acquired habit disdaining reason.
Fanon’s last book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” had a profound influence on black radicals like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. To the Black Panthers, Fanon was a prophet.
This “Bible of decolonialism” limned the gross exploitation of colonialism. It rightly raged at racism. It railed against colonial masters who argued that if they left their colonies, Africans “would regress into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction to “Wretched” with this command: “Have the courage to read it primarily because it will make you feel ashamed. And shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling.” Colonists plundered Africa, stealing its wealth, nationhood and manhood. They kept the natives “penned in apartheid” and “scarred by the whip.”
“The church in the colonies is the white man’s church, a foreigner’s church,” Fanon declared. “It does not call the colonizeds to the ways of God but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.”
Douglass had the same problem. He tells of attending a Methodist communion in the North, the blacks clustered near the back door. After all the whites had been served, the minister exclaimed: “Come up, colored friends, come up! You know that God makes no distinction among people.” Douglass never went to church again.
The New York Review of Books aptly described Fanon in 1966 as a “black Rousseau…His call for national revolutions is Jacobin in method, Rosseauist in spirit and Sartrian in language--altogether as French as can be.”
Fanon: doctor, intellectual and humanist. He urged the overthrow of barbaric capitalism and its replacement by humane socialism. He was right. But that may take centuries in America where mammon comes first.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home