Modern Day Colonialism

The first ever department of English was established in the colony of the subcontinent. And do you wonder why? To make us into better slaves. And if you still cannot understand what it means, you can just listen to Rishi Sunak, the PM of UK. He is of an Indian descent and India was a British colony up until 78 years ago. When you look at him, stating his stance on the ceasefire, his refusal to consider the ceasefire and letting humanitarian aid into Gaza, you understand that he still has that mentality of a people that were colonized years ago and still can’t break out of this colonial mindset where you cannot steer away from what your “master” wants.

The colonials have always believed that the whites are a superior race and everyone else is touched by the devil and are cannibals. Everyone else is less human and are animals and have to be treated as such. One would have thought that this is the twenty first century and human beings will not be judged by the colour of their skin or the country they are born in or the religion they follow. It turns out that you are wrong! Even when there are millions of immigrants in the European countries and US and Canada, Muslims are not equal human beings and will never be treated as one. The people of colour will always be the people of colour. The constant repetition from the Israeli Ministers, calling Palestinians, as ‘human animals’ doesn’t come as a shock. This has always been the case with the colonizers, oppressors and occupiers. The Western Media, who claims to be the upholder of human rights and free speech, is not disgusted, or shows any remorse into supporting the idea that ,’Yes! They can say that to the people of Palestine, as they are not “white skinned, blue eyed, Europeans”. There is no backlash as such from the so called human right activists that how can one human life be less worthy as compared to a fair-skinned European.

The language, the lexicon that has been used in the news by the anchor persons or the interviewers or the leaders of the world shape the way they want people to think about a certain situation and the events. There are always sides. The right and the wrong side. What these small ‘slip of tongues’, deliberate use of certain words and the words that construe a certain image in the minds of the masses, do is sometimes completely change the way a person might be thinking. Let’s start with a context, when 9/11 happened, Bush, on the TV called war on Afghanistan, ‘ a crusade!’ This word ‘crusade’ have a religious context and this is exactly what they tried to implant in the minds of people. The kind of phrases that followed were, ‘whether you are “with us” or “against us” driving people into thinking that there is only one way to handle this situation and that be to wipe out a country where “others” live, who in turn are a threat to our existence. The constant need for asking the Muslims to condemn what happened on 7th October has become a crucial part of how the media starts their day but the same people are not saying a word of condemnation on the killings of 7000+ innocent civilians, because these innocent Palestinian civilians are “the others” and not “humans” and are “lesser beings”. They have started calling it a war between Israel and Gaza. What hypocrisy is this?? Israel, having ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the best intelligence agency, sophisticated and trained army, against innocent civilians without water, food supply, electricity and medicine… There is NO COMPARISON!

I don’t personally think that it’s colonialism. This is pure ethnic cleansing as the US minister said that they will turn Gaza into “parking lot”. Time and again the Israeli minister has said that we will “kill” everyone of them. The Israeli Minister saying on TV that drive them out into the Sinai Desert. The Israelis chanting in Jerusalem that ‘ there are no schools in Gaza, we have killed all the children’. This is not colonialism, this is a GENOCIDE! This is their mindset, this is their aim. The so-called flagbearers of peace, are all murderers. The journalists sided with the oppressors. The news channels aided the massacre of innocent children, unborn babies in the wombs of their mother, the mothers, the fathers, and the innocent people just because they lived on the “other side”!

Then and Now

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its lead, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge in the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer lover the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path.

– Umberto Eco. The Name Of The Rose.

Back to Literature

I kept trying to settle down in linguistics, but it certainly was not my cup of tea. All of us, who took admission to do our second Masters after completing our Masters in Literature, kept asking ourselves as to what we were doing there. Well, I dropped out. Why?! Well… I sorted out my priorities…

Now, back at home, relaxing for the next few months, I have all the time now to drool over all those books which I have been planning to read for the past couple of years but didn’t get time to indulge in. I’ve taken out all those books and I’m actually planning to read them inshAllah. ( Well I even bought some right after the last exam.)

Anyway, there’s something that literature has taught us: How to Read! I mean I don’t mean I’m a very good reader, but surely our reading speed has decreased because there’s something about these books which is beyond the storyline. Even if I’m reading a children’s story book, I try to connect so many things at once that it’s not just the book or story I’m involved in, it’s even the white space between words which is fully laden with meaning. And how can we actually draw a line between literature and life, or experience or emotion. Even when reading non-fiction or philosophy or anything, you can never deny the impact of those words that you read. (I might write a separate post on that.) But seriously, how can one ever deny the strong impact of words even when you’re not paying any attention to it!

Anyways, it’s been a long time… And I can’t wait to read everything which is worth reading other than the rules of phonology or Teaching English as a second language. Finally I’ll try to read something which is other than how to retreive data from my memory. 🙂

Grammar

I have been trying really hard to actually learn all the grammatical things; sentence structures, adverbial phrase, adjuncts and progressive something for the past few days. I have Grammar exam tomorrow and I hardly know anything regarding it!

“What did you do the whole semester?” ( yep… mum actually yelled at me)

“Well the teacher was soft and we used to talk and discuss things and share jokes in her classes” (lol)

Well, mum shook her head and didn’t know what to say. So I just kept mumbling about how I still don’t know what exactly these things are. Anyway, while all this was going on, something clicked in my mind. I remembered reading something about Grammar which was quoted by Jonathan Culler ( the guy I read like anything last semester to actually understand Structuralism), in his book “Structuralist Poetics”.Let me put it her;

” I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar”

– Nietzsche

I don’t reallly want to interpret it. Anyway, Apart from this my mentor once said, k when we reach university, we should forget about the grammatical rules. The language should be engraved in our minds in such a way that we know it and do not need to learn grammar anymore.

I miss literature… literature… where you don’t actually focus on the grammatical rules yet you should know the grammar to be able to interpret it. It’s like internalization of rules of grammar and… OH! what am I saying… Gotto go! Have to do something about those grammatical rules!

Love

“Near the brick grave there was a tomb erected very soon after the flood for two bodies that were found in close embrace, and it was visited at different moments by two men who both felt that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were forever buried there.
One of them visited the tomb again with a sweet face beside him – but that was years after.
The other was always solitary. His great companionship was among the trees of the Red Deeps, where the buried joy seemed still to hover like a revisiting spirit.”

from Ruba’iyat

Oh eye you are not blind, see the grave

And see this world full of distractions and bitterness;

Kings, heads and princes are under the clay 

See moon-bright faces in the jaws of ants

 

 

From The Ruba’iyat of Omar Kayyam (Translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs)

 

Religion, Culture and Literature…

I smsed my brother asking if he has “The Prince” and he replied in affirmation. I texted back saying,”I’ll be highly obliged if you can bring it”. He later commented that my “highly obliged” reflected the mentality of a slave. And I replied, “As if taking a degree in English is not a reflection enough !”

A few weeks back, a cousin of mine was asking about some symbol on orkut and her brother tried to show that he doesn’t know. And as I was standing nearby I shouted out that word loud and clear. And her brother looked at me, shocked, and then told her sister, ” that’s why I didn’t say it!” The word is commonly used but has vulgar connotations. And with this the realisation dawned upon me that I’m getting accustomed to all those words which are not a part of my culture. In the book Doing English, the author has clearly stated that with every word of a foreign language comes the whole cultural package. And with this the fear took over me. Am I falling through the bottomless pit of a foreign culture?! From then onwards I became conscious of every word that I use and am trying still to shun every word that does not reflect decency.

But how many of us actually realise that?! Last year while attending one of the presentations of the research group in our department, the professor said that not every word can be translated. In Arabic we use words which have no direct one word in English or any other language. It’s true for Urdu and other languages. And this is true for English as well. The words become terminologies! Once attending the lecture of philosophy, a professor said that we should avoid using words like “enlightenment” and “modern” because these are not words with simple meanings, for Occidentals these are terminologies that have derived from their history and culture. These words date back from the 16th and 17th Centuries, the age that Europe called The Age of Enlightenment. The shift from homo-centric to the ego-centric culture, when man became more important. And these all are not part of our culture.

In Notes Towards the definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot says that Europe’s culture is deeply seated in the religious history of Europe. The literature of Europe has it’s roots so deep in Christianity that even now when some of them reject every religion, their every action is Christian. And Muhammad Asad in his book The Road to Makkah says that he has come to the theory that the European prejudice and hatred towards Islam and Muslims is dated as back as the first Crusades! So it’s deep rooted in their hearts, and is instilled in their genes and they cannot detach it from themselves. It has become part of their culture. And it was T.S.Eliot who said that Culture is derived from religion and faith (with it or the lack of it). And as writers cannot write in a vacuum, and they incorporate their genes into the whole experience of writing, we see the reflection of their beliefs, culture and thoughts. So, when I am reading Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte or James, I am actually exposing myself to their culture and beliefs. I remember a friend saying that it seems as if we know more than the average European about their sects and religion and history. It’s incorporated in their literature.

Now the effect of literature upon our lives: The first ever department of English was established in the colony of Subcontinent. The English believed that literature would incorporate certain values in the Indians without them realising it. And this would help them make better slaves. And they would not realise the religious moulding through literature. So, literature became a tool of making us more “civilized” in the eyes of West to serve their own purposes. Literature, if read passively, works subtely yet moves your insides violently. Your mind may accept things subconsciously or unconciously and may effect your whole way of thinking. And I realised that you need to be active when reading literature, alert all the time, in order to keep their beliefs and metaphysics at bay.

The recent writers of Pakistan, who chose English to be their medium of communicating their ideas, do not reflect the embedded culture of the East. And when I’m talking about Muslim writers, I’m talking about the culture of Islam. The writers have not only chosen English but they have incorporated the ideas of Europe, their culture in those writings reflecting their own “slave-ish mentality”.  The embedded idea in our minds that doing English, eating with forks and spoons and sitting on a dining table reflects the marks of civilization, without realising that in our culture, eating with your hands and sitting on the floor are the marks of being “civilized”.

It’s high time for us to realise that our culture, literature and everything else have a center, and that center is Islam. And the unification in things come from that one center. We may be able to intitutionalise every “branch” of knowledge, but the cente would allow a Muslim to see things in totality and not in fractions. And we see all that in the works of Muslim poets from Rumi to Iqbal. So, even if we are to read the Western authors, we need to counter that effect by reading our own literature in the languages of the East, mainly Urdu, Arabic or Persian. It’s high time to stand facing the current and yet not loose our grounds. And we can only do that by standing in our own cultural grounds and not borrowed ones. We have far more better examples than those of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.