Skip to main content

When Political Correctness Falls into the Lap of Dummies


Good god, is nothing sacred anymore?

I was browsing on Goodreads when I came across the following comments (most probably from a teenager) about Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), the mother of all memoirs:

I have no idea why my mom recommended this book to me. A white British colonist tells the story of her privileged life on her coffee plantation in Kenya. She writes some great imagery about the Kenyan landscape and tells funny stories about animals, except that her idea of the landscape and animals includes all the Black servants and workers and "squatters" on her plantation. She is really stupid and proudly naive. It's awful. For example, when she jokingly threatens to fire all of her servants if they don't find this cute baby antelope she saw while on an outing, she thinks it's out of love for her that they spend all night searching for it. How darling of them!

I think you're supposed to find her some sort of feminist heroine because she owns this plantation all by herself. If you believe this, please go read Bell Hooks.

I kept on reading hoping to find some great literary merit like one supposedly finds in Heart of Darkness, but all I found was a tired narrative of some lady and her normalized owning class life. Booooorrrrrrinnnnngggg.

What’s wrong with this picture? (Allow me to don my Hat of Pedantry before I proceed.)

For those unfamiliar with the book, Blixen’s autobiography records her life in Kenya in the 1920s. Let me repeat: NINETEEN TWENTIES. Lifetimes away from our so-PC-you-can’t-even-say-Merry-Christmas-without-someone-setting-up-a-protest-group day and age. Some of you may know the Meryl Streep/Robert Redford film adaptation. The film, though exquisite in its own right, differs greatly from the book. Unsurprising for a Hollywood project, you’d say.

But I digress.

It’s a sign of the times when young readers approach books written before their parents were born with politically correct 21st-century morals. Back in the late 80s, I was naïve to think I’d find romance, as a result of the film adaptation, in a bona-fide autobiography; in the 2010s, it’s naïve of the young to think they’d interpret the world armed with their brand of institutionalised, Benetton-inspired morals. Whose fault is this? School systems around the world that blindly and unquestioningly preach political correctness. 

Young folks don’t realise there’s a time when one could own servants, and the bond between master and servant was a sacred one. They don’t realise for a lone Danish woman to survive in 1920’s Kenya she had to adhere to the accepted mores concerning black and white segregation. They don’t realise that the wish to remain segregated could come from the natives, too. 21st-century education has taught them an embarrassingly one-sided truth about race relations. In their eyes there’s often a guilty party of oppressors and a designated group of victims. Rarely does it cross their minds that real life involving real people doesn’t function that neatly. When they’re confronted with it, as they are while reading Blixen, they react with (misguided) self-righteousness. To me, this is infinitely more disturbing than my youthful penchant of romanticising reality.

So to this particular young reader I say: Go back to school and demand a more nuanced education. Your educators have failed you. But you may find comfort in this: you're the rule rather than the exception...


(Hat of Pedantry off.)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are always appreciated! Do feel free to leave them or start a discussion.

Popular posts from this blog

Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore  does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [10])
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sound of Alienation: Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Voices”

In the nine “Voices” poems (“Die Stemmen,” 1902), we find Rilke speaking out for those who have suffered pain and injustice. He insists that in order for them to be heard, they need to “advertise” themselves, and this should be done through singing, or songs – like the castrati (referred to as “these cut ones”) who sing to God and compel him to stay and listen. This message is found in the “Title Leaf” – an introduction of sorts to the nine songs. It is tempting to read the nine songs (“Beggar’s,” “Blind Man’s,” “Drunkard’s,” “Suicide’s,” “Widow’s,” “Idiot’s,” “Orphan Girl’s,” “Dwarf’s,” “Leper’s”) as a collection of poetic pleas for social awareness. This is due to Rilke’s “casting choices”; he has selected society’s most conspicuous outcasts as the main speakers of his poems. When, for instance, the beggar in “The Beggar’s Song” says, “I go always from door to door/rain-soaked and sun-scorched,” we are induced to sympathise with his downtrodden fate. The same can be said for
Post a Comment
Read more

Murakami Salutes Orwell: How "1Q84" Pays Homage to "1984" (Part 2)

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic
Post a Comment
Read more