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Obama spells end of 500-year-old colonial curse
By Andrew Lam |
November 19, 2012, Monday
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AS a refugee from Vietnam, I see the Obama presidency as spelling the end of a 500-year-old colonial curse.
Decades ago, English still unruly on my tongue, I read a spin off of Daniel Defoe's "The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," but I read it not as most of my American peers did. I saw myself, on one level or another, as Friday, his servant.
A British sailor participating in the slave trade, Crusoe was shipwrecked off the coast of Venezuela. He was alone for some years but managed with his guns to rescue a native prisoner who was about to be eaten by his captors. He named him Man Friday, taught him English and converted him to Christianity. He taught Friday to call him "master."
James Joyce once noted that Defoe's sailor is the symbol of the imperial conquest, that "he is the true prototype of the British colonist.... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity."
Likewise, all of those who have been colonized and oppressed in the age of European expansionism are embodied in Friday. Indentured and "saved" by Crusoe, Friday becomes, over the centuries, a political symbol of racial injustice, of victims of colonization and imperialist expansion, of slavery.
Friday was African, Native American, Asian, Latin American. And Friday was all the children born from miscegenation.
In the aftermath of the age of European conquest, many went in search of identity - cultural, national, personal - but the legacy remained largely that of an inferiority complex, a kind of grievance trap nearly impossible for those previously subordinated by the West to escape.
The power structure is often stacked against them. Having been conquered and divided, in the aftermath, the previously colonized people are often ruled by distrust and disorganization.
Defined by the West
English is the global language of choice. From Western-style clothing to commerce to political dominance, history seems largely defined by the West. Species long known to natives are constantly "discovered" and given Latin and Greek names.
For a while, as a Vietnamese refugee to America, I grieved. Then I resigned myself to the idea that I was fated to live at the empire's outer edge, living in a world in which Friday's children were destined to play subservient roles and be sidekicks.
Who knows then when the story began to shift? Perhaps the resistant narratives were always there all along, hidden in the blues sung by slaves toiling in the fields, existing in pockets in the various regions and with various peoples waiting to form a chorus, waiting for a right conductor to come along, for the right moment to form a new symphony.
It may very well have begun with Frederick Douglass. Lewis Hyde, in his seminal work, "Trickster Makes This World," regards Douglass as a kind of trickster - like Hermes or Loki or Eshu - who learned to reallocate power, a "cunning go-between ... thief of reapportionment who quit the periphery and moved to the center."
Born a slave in Maryland in 1818 to white father and black mother, he learned the alphabet from his master's wife.
He stole books. He learned how to read and write.
He taught others. He became an abolitionist, editor, a suffragist, author, and the first African American nominated vice president in 1872 on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States.
But what did Douglass actually steal? The language of the masters. Eloquence. He mastered it. He spoke up. He thereby crossed the color lines, the demarcations which he was not supposed to cross.
He wrote autobiographies - "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," "My Bondage and My Freedom" and "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" - and, according to Hyde, his stories challenged and broke "the rule of silence and contest the white world's fiction about slavery," and his articulation in turn liberated him and others.
No longer subservient
For this is the way the new power lies: Those who once dwelled at the margins of the Commonwealth have appropriated the language of their colonial masters and used it with great degree of articulation as they inch toward the center. If Crusoe contends that he still is the lead actor, Friday is far from being content to playing subservient and sidekick any longer.
That old superior-inferior fiction is further supplanted and eroded by the way history flows. Major cities have become highly diverse, and demographers point to the inevitable: by the year of 2050 whites will become a minority, just like the rest.
It was Defoe's conceit in his novel - published in 1719 and considered by many as the first novel written in English - that the 'savage' can only be redeemed by assimilation into Crusoe's culture and religion.
But on November 4, 2008, Friday spoke up loud and clear and eloquently, and declared himself an equal. And his voice is reaffirmed on November 6, 2012.
He tells us to dare to dream big, for change has already come and the world forever changed. The old curse ends. A child of any race in America now has a fighting chance.
Those who dwell at the margins can see a path toward the center, crossing all kinds of demarcations, dispelling the old superior-inferior myth. He knows now it's within his powers to articulate and reshape his new world, regardless the color of his skin, and to have the audacity to play central character of the script of his own making.
New America Media editor, Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost" is due out in 2013.
Decades ago, English still unruly on my tongue, I read a spin off of Daniel Defoe's "The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," but I read it not as most of my American peers did. I saw myself, on one level or another, as Friday, his servant.
A British sailor participating in the slave trade, Crusoe was shipwrecked off the coast of Venezuela. He was alone for some years but managed with his guns to rescue a native prisoner who was about to be eaten by his captors. He named him Man Friday, taught him English and converted him to Christianity. He taught Friday to call him "master."
James Joyce once noted that Defoe's sailor is the symbol of the imperial conquest, that "he is the true prototype of the British colonist.... The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity."
Likewise, all of those who have been colonized and oppressed in the age of European expansionism are embodied in Friday. Indentured and "saved" by Crusoe, Friday becomes, over the centuries, a political symbol of racial injustice, of victims of colonization and imperialist expansion, of slavery.
Friday was African, Native American, Asian, Latin American. And Friday was all the children born from miscegenation.
In the aftermath of the age of European conquest, many went in search of identity - cultural, national, personal - but the legacy remained largely that of an inferiority complex, a kind of grievance trap nearly impossible for those previously subordinated by the West to escape.
The power structure is often stacked against them. Having been conquered and divided, in the aftermath, the previously colonized people are often ruled by distrust and disorganization.
Defined by the West
English is the global language of choice. From Western-style clothing to commerce to political dominance, history seems largely defined by the West. Species long known to natives are constantly "discovered" and given Latin and Greek names.
For a while, as a Vietnamese refugee to America, I grieved. Then I resigned myself to the idea that I was fated to live at the empire's outer edge, living in a world in which Friday's children were destined to play subservient roles and be sidekicks.
Who knows then when the story began to shift? Perhaps the resistant narratives were always there all along, hidden in the blues sung by slaves toiling in the fields, existing in pockets in the various regions and with various peoples waiting to form a chorus, waiting for a right conductor to come along, for the right moment to form a new symphony.
It may very well have begun with Frederick Douglass. Lewis Hyde, in his seminal work, "Trickster Makes This World," regards Douglass as a kind of trickster - like Hermes or Loki or Eshu - who learned to reallocate power, a "cunning go-between ... thief of reapportionment who quit the periphery and moved to the center."
Born a slave in Maryland in 1818 to white father and black mother, he learned the alphabet from his master's wife.
He stole books. He learned how to read and write.
He taught others. He became an abolitionist, editor, a suffragist, author, and the first African American nominated vice president in 1872 on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President of the United States.
But what did Douglass actually steal? The language of the masters. Eloquence. He mastered it. He spoke up. He thereby crossed the color lines, the demarcations which he was not supposed to cross.
He wrote autobiographies - "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," "My Bondage and My Freedom" and "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" - and, according to Hyde, his stories challenged and broke "the rule of silence and contest the white world's fiction about slavery," and his articulation in turn liberated him and others.
No longer subservient
For this is the way the new power lies: Those who once dwelled at the margins of the Commonwealth have appropriated the language of their colonial masters and used it with great degree of articulation as they inch toward the center. If Crusoe contends that he still is the lead actor, Friday is far from being content to playing subservient and sidekick any longer.
That old superior-inferior fiction is further supplanted and eroded by the way history flows. Major cities have become highly diverse, and demographers point to the inevitable: by the year of 2050 whites will become a minority, just like the rest.
It was Defoe's conceit in his novel - published in 1719 and considered by many as the first novel written in English - that the 'savage' can only be redeemed by assimilation into Crusoe's culture and religion.
But on November 4, 2008, Friday spoke up loud and clear and eloquently, and declared himself an equal. And his voice is reaffirmed on November 6, 2012.
He tells us to dare to dream big, for change has already come and the world forever changed. The old curse ends. A child of any race in America now has a fighting chance.
Those who dwell at the margins can see a path toward the center, crossing all kinds of demarcations, dispelling the old superior-inferior myth. He knows now it's within his powers to articulate and reshape his new world, regardless the color of his skin, and to have the audacity to play central character of the script of his own making.
New America Media editor, Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost" is due out in 2013.
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