Anna Della Subin’s NYRB review of Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut enlightened me about a modernist movement I was only barely aware of (though of course I’d heard of Adonis):
Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings is the story of how Arabic made it new. Beirut has been overlooked in classic histories of modernism, yet Creswell, a professor of comparative literature at Yale, […] has remedied this with eloquence and erudition in his study of how a group of exiles, iconoclasts, and émigrés—al-Khal, Adonis, and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj foremost among them—radically transformed Arabic poetry. In addition to abandoning traditional forms, the Beiruti modernists sought to purify poetry of the politics that kept it mired in its own time and place. At a moment when intellectuals across the Middle East were divided along nationalist, Pan-Arabist, monarchist, and Marxist lines, [the avant-garde quarterly magazine] Shi‘r [‘Poetry’] was avowedly nonpartisan, and talk of politics was discouraged at the magazine’s weekly literary salons. The question of what it meant to write poetry without politics, and how one might achieve this in a fractured city on the verge of civil war, is threaded throughout Creswell’s impressive book.
This study also speaks to the asymmetries, still with us, of the midcentury modernist project and its quest to create a world literature. Encountering Europe’s literary powerbrokers in Rome, the Beiruti poets were surprised to find their ideas met with reproach. In his response to Adonis, Spender chastised him for his “complete disregard for the ancient heritage of Arabic poetry,” finding his “demolition of poetic traditions” too “extremist,” according to the Arabic transcript of the conference. Although Spender criticized British poets for provincialism in dwelling too much on their own pleasant isles, non-European poets were expected to retain “local color,” Creswell writes, if they desired to participate in the circuits of world literature. The Beiruti poets sought to escape the confinements of region. Yet their European interlocutors, fearing the kind of standardized, monolithic culture they attributed to their Soviet antagonists, demanded that nonwhite writers preserve and perform their ethnic distinctiveness, to write in culturally “authentic” modes. By refusing to conform to entrenched rules of how the poet should engage with identity, ideology, and heritage, the Shi‘r group challenged the burgeoning international literary culture.
The Arabic word al-hadatha can mean either “modernity” or “modernism,” and derives from hadutha, “to be new.” The Beiruti poets were confident, Creswell writes, in their sense of what modernism was. It wasn’t to be found in the silhouettes of sleek cars and revving engines, where Marinetti saw it, or in “the latest feats in civic engineering” that awed Hart Crane. The rising city of Beirut, its architecture and crowds, is largely absent from the poetry of Shi‘r. Instead, the poets were looking out to sea. Their poems trace itineraries from ruined desert landscapes, covered with an Orientalist dusting of sand and sleep, to open waters of adventure, encounter, and exchange. “And by day we go down to the ports of safety,/to the boats with sails unfurled for travel,” writes al-Khal in his Pound-saturated trilogy “The Call of the Sea,” much of which was serialized in Shi‘r in 1957. It was a journey that, for al-Khal and Adonis, was autobiographical, a migration from Syrian mountains to the Lebanese coast but also a voyage away from political engagement and toward what Creswell calls “a heroized notion of cultural struggle.”
Arabic modernism arose from the ashes, Creswell writes, of ardent nationalism. As teenagers, al-Khal and Ali Ahmad Said Esber, both from villages in northwestern Syria, joined the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a mytho-political movement founded in 1932 by the charismatic Greek Orthodox liberationist Antun Sa‘ada. It was Sa‘ada who first inspired them to look to a deep, mythic past, and to forge a place for Syrian literature on what al-Khal referred to as the “map of world literature.” Sa‘ada called for a greatly expanded Syrian nation—spanning the entire Fertile Crescent—and saw archaeological ruins as the bedrock upon which to stage a national rebirth. Levantine people, for Sa‘ada, were racially distinct from Arab-Muslims: they were descendants of the ancient Phoenicians, intrepid Mediterranean seafarers who built coastal cities such as Carthage, Byblos, and Tyre. For Sa‘ada, cuneiform writings discovered in Latakia on Ugaritic clay tablets, containing the earliest known alphabet, proved that Syria was the true cradle of Western civilization—a primacy to which it needed to be restored. The tablets involved myths of an ancient Mesopotamian deity who dies and is resurrected each year, and who has gone by many names, including Tammuz. The Greeks, according to Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough, mistook his title for his name and called him “Adonis,” or Lord. In the mid-1940s, as a student and party member in Damascus, Esber, hailing from near where the tablets had been found, adopted his mythic nom de plume. […]
In the pages of the little magazine, modernism emerged in translation, or, in al-Khal’s word, naql, which can mean an act of carrying, transportation, or transfer, as well as a change of residence. The poets often chose to translate maritime verses, transforming them on the level of the line, as Creswell demonstrates, giving them what he calls a “strange at-homeness in Beirut.” In al-Khal’s translation of “Night” by the California poet Robinson Jeffers, a bleak poem of human frailty on the Pacific coast turns in Arabic into “a parable of humanist fortitude set in a specifically Lebanese seascape.” In Shi‘r, modernism became an act of finding, even in the most remote texts, words that spoke deeply to the Beiruti poets’ sense of identity and history, making more local ideas of “heritage” seem limiting and impoverished. Alongside poems in translation, Shi‘r published original Arabic poetry, manifestos, critical essays, and dispatches by correspondents from Baghdad to Berlin. […]
Creswell commendably situates Adonis as one among many, but readers may wish we learned more about the women writers who were also a part of the Shi‘r scene. We meet in passing Khalida Sa‘id, who was among the magazine’s most prominent literary critics, was married to Adonis, and also had a militant past in the SSNP. We encounter the acclaimed Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika, an early Shi‘r contributor, but as a commentator rather than a figure in her own right. The poet-scholar Salma Khadra Jayyusi appears in an endnote. The Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, who was in the inaugural issue of Shi‘r, is absent from the book, as is the Lebanese luminary Layla Baalbaki, author of the controversial feminist short story collection Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon, and whose first novel was published by Shi‘r after it was rejected everywhere else.
In the autumn 1958 issue of Shi‘r, the twenty-eight-year-old Adonis published “Only Despair,” considered by many to be the first Arabic prose poem, shattering the structures of classical meter codified by the philologist al-Farahidi 1,100 years earlier. In Arabic, the same word, bahr, is used for both “sea” and “meter.” Adonis would call the new form of the prose poem, or qasidat al-nathr, “our ark and our flood.” Like the Biblical cataclysm, the prose poem drowned traditional forms while also preserving and transforming them.
Since its enshrinement in the eighth century, Arabic poetry had largely stayed within classical configurations. Lines of verse were, like Old English poetry, made of two equal halves with a caesura in the middle, creating a particular rhythm and music that defined poetry itself. In the late 1940s free verse pioneers such as al-Mala’ika and al-Sayyab began to break away from the caesura, yet still wrote in metered lines, preserving the evocative music, or tarab, that could strike deep emotions in listeners. Responding to the invention of the Arabic prose poem, al-Mala’ika called it a “strange and heretical innovation,” and asked whether the apostates were perhaps “ignorant of the limits of poetry.” Fiercely attacked, the Beiruti modernists looked to the international authority of figures such as Perse, Pound, and Eliot to sanction their new, blasphemous form.
I’m glad Della Subin made a point of emphasizing the women writers, and Spender’s complaint that the Arabic poets weren’t providing him with the desired local color makes me spitting mad. It’s like the white entrepreneurs who allegedly loved the blues but forced blues guitarists to play acoustic instruments because it suited their ideas of what “real” blues was, or collectors of African music who only cared about “authentic” music supposedly without Western influence. Why do people feel the need to police other people’s artistry?
Khalil Gibran was educated in Boston, and D T Suzuki studied there too, and both were Emersonians. Just saying.
My pal John was educated in Boston too. (I don’t think he’s an Emersonian, though.)
Spender’s complaint that the Arabic poets weren’t providing him with the desired local color makes me spitting mad.
He is a poet and person. I think he is at right to share his opinion with another poet and person. I do not think that it would make you angry if you saw him as a “colleaugue” and equal among equals, he must be acting in a different capacity to cause such a reaction. Maybe you are right. But:
– he is still a person and poet. Any additional role exists in parallel.
– this additional role (“different capacity”) must be understood first, else we arrive to “pale intellectuals must not share their opinions with coloured intellectuals”.
As I understand, the situation is not “a writer from a shithole wants to get published in the metropoly” (this one would be hopeless! Publishers by definition select a few “interesting” among really many brilliant authors, any criterion is discriminative by defintion) and Beirut is not a shithole anyway. Rather it is a dialogue of a group with a larger movement in “world literature” comprising many groups. When you are a crow it, of course, can be unpleasant if the bird movement tells you how to caw. Yet there must be a place for dialogue.
It makes me shake my head when i see that Americans can’t write an article without mentioning race.
And since when were Lebanese ‘nonwhite’?!?
Given that the last people born as slaves in the US lived well into the lifetime of most Hatters, and that the effects of slavery are still very much with us, it is hardly surprising that Americans are highly concerned with “race”; it would be pretty sinister if they were not.
American racial labels are indeed weird; but that is one of the very effects in question.
Re Spender and local colour: it’s not as if Anglophone Modernism represents a radical discontinuity with tradition. On the contrary, it involves complex references to that tradition and repurposing of many elements of it. An Arabic “Modernism” that tried to break altogether with Arabic literary tradition would be doing something quite different, though quite possibly something worthwhile in its own right, of course.
Where I would take issue with Spender would be in the criticism (attributed to him in the article) of localism in western Modernism. Is Ulysses not authentically Modernist? (And how about Proust? I’d call him a Modernist too. There’s more than one way to do it …)
Innovative Arabic writers clearly experienced pushback from Westerners who felt that they should be quaint and Oriental, but that is nothing to do with “Modernism.”
The answer depends on your definition of “white” and “nonwhite,” which ironically has always included a large grey area between WASPs on the one side, and Africans, Asians and native Americans on the other.
A growing scholarly literature on “whiteness studies” (e.g., Jacobson 1999) treats the grey area as “nonwhite,” which enables publishing book-length studies on how various groups of immigrants to the U.S. moved from being considered ethnically suspicious to being fully integrated into the white ruling caste: e.g., Irishmen (Ignatiev 1995), Jews (Brodkin 1998), or Italians (Guglielmo and Salerno 2004).
You can push back against that lumping, and argue instead that those groups should always be counted as “white”. Here’s a version of that counter-argument in the Washington Post. But note that this is coming from a law professor, and the definition of whiteness as a requisite for U.S. citizenship law was long a problem for the courts (Lopez 2006). I don’t think anyone ever challenged the legal whiteness of Irishmen; if they tried with Sicilians they must have failed very early. On the other hand, Jews were reasonably worried, and Arabs had to fight quite hard to be counted as white (Dow v. United States, 1915).
Finally, it’s worth recalling that the poster child for the most incredibly restrictive definition of “white” is none other than beloved founding father Benjamin Franklin (1751). I’m sure this isn’t the first time this quotation is provided in this venue, but here it goes again.
swarthy
And you, Swede?
Colour studies are all right, but what they have to do with Spender? I do not think that Spender and the folks in Beirut cared about it.
Just last Gulf War a slur for them was sand nigger.
He is a poet and person. I think he is at right to share his opinion with another poet and person.
So you think his opinion is entirely personal? Permit me to disagree. That’s like saying an old person who thinks young people are foolish and listen to bad music and use bad grammar is purely expressing a random personal opinion and should not be taken as part of any kind of groupthink.
It makes me shake my head when i see that Americans can’t write an article without mentioning race.
Where do you see a mention of race in the article? If you’re talking about me, I mentioned racial attitudes as a comparison, and I think it’s a good and useful one. And Lebanese have definitely been considered nonwhite. Learn your history.
I know my history and i know it’s different from US history, which is different from Lebanese history and from Italian history. 😉
It is tedious repeatedly seeing this US worldview, where everything is apparently seen in terms of race.
I’d bet that most people outside of the US wouldn’t give a stuff if poetry was written by someone ‘white’ or ‘nonwhite’ (whatever that might mean). It wouldn’t even occur to me to question what ‘race’ a poet is. Who cares?
It’s enough to just call him a Lebanese poet (if emphasis is really required) and be done with it.
It is tedious repeatedly seeing this US worldview, where everything is apparently seen in terms of race.
Do you find it tedious when Africans mention colonialism, or when Russians mention communism? Race is the defining feature of American history; of course Americans talk about race. Sorry if it’s tedious to you, but it behooves all of us to accept each other’s histories and worldviews. Otherwise there’s not much point bothering to talk to each other.
Yes it’s tedious when it is mentioned ad nauseum outside its context. What’s Unsi al-Hajj have to do with the USA and its apparent fixation on race? Or for that matter with Russians and their alleged mentioning of Communism?
Brits too could have analyzed the world in terms of class struggle and describe Lebanon as a “lower-class country” (in an effort to defeat classism and after recognizing that “class blidness” is bad). But alas!
Communists did it first.
It is certainly relevant to the piece that Spender allegedly saw Adonis as “exotic” and didn’t want him to fully adopt an international/cosmopolitan modernist style devoid of “local color.” The question is whether it is useful to treat the Western/non-Western distinction as identical to the white/non-white distinction. I think it is unhelpful and pernicious. Now whether Spender himself and those like him thought of Adonis and similar Lebanese/Syrian writers as “non-white” versus merely non-Western (“Oriental”) is not clear to me, but I certainly don’t think imposing a 21st century American college-town conceptual schema onto European writers of the 1930’s (if that’s what is happening) is constructive.
Here is some relevant language from the 1915 U.S. federal appellate court decision that thought this an easy question (although obviously it was only in court because not 100% of folks out there concurred):
‘At the date of the new acts and amendments, especially the act of 1873, with its amendment of 1875, it seems to.be true beyond question that the generally received opinion was that the inhabitants of a portion of Asia, including Syria, were to be classed as white persons. It is true that Syria and the contiguous countries of Asia near the Mediterranean have been subjected to many changes in their inhabitants through conquest and other causes, and that the present inhabitants have racial descent from many different sources. Yet, as the consensus of opinion at the time of the enactment of the statute now in force was that they were so closely related to their neighbors on the European side of the Mediterranean that they should be classed as white, they must be held to fall within the term “white persons” used in the statute. The statute has been given this more liberal construction, so as to include within the term “white persons” Syrians, Armenians, and Parsees.’
The judge who wrote that opinion was a septuagenarian white dude from South Carolina (born 1852) who was a pillar of the Jim Crow establishment and no one’s idea of a soppy liberal on racial matters.
The question is whether it is useful to treat the Western/non-Western distinction as identical to the white/non-white distinction. I think it is unhelpful and pernicious.
Good thing nobody did that!
the European side of the Mediterranean
So Egyptians are suspicious…
The Finns also had to go to court to prove they were white, because of their non-Indo-European language. Scan was the plaintiff.
Race is central to American life, but I can agree that Americans on both sides of the fence often racialize things excessively, and that American racial thinking is irrelevant and misleading outside our borders. For a left example, the term POC creates a supposed group with no commonality except the fact that racist white Americans hate them, a very limited shared trait. And the occasional claims that Pushkin and Dumas were black makes sense only with the American one-drop rule.
Even in the US the standard American racial discourse falls apart WRT Hawaii.
@drasvi: I don’t think there was any material immigration of folks from North Africa to the U.S. in those days even though there was material immigration from the Levant before WW1, so the issue didn’t really arise in a U.S. context. U.S. law in those days would naturalize both “white persons” and persons of “African nativity” or “African descent,” but not persons who were some third thing (prototypically but not only Chinese). So you could have potentially gotten back into the issue recently aired in another thread about whether Egyptians are “African.”
Brits too could have analyzed the world in terms of class struggle
Brits persistently misunderstand Marxism exactly because they confuse their social classes with the economic classes Marx was talking about. (The vast majority of “middle-class” Brits belong to the working class, sensu Marxiano.)
This confusion is currently damaging the Labour Party, with the Starmerites apparently under the impression that only coal miners (or something) count as “workers”, not office-worker wage-slaves, librarians, teachers, doctors or college lecturers, for example. You can only be an authentic Labourite if you don’t really enjoy reading, it seems.
But not many university professors own the means of production nowadays.
Definitions of “class” is are particular to time and place. I’m not sure that Marx thought otherwise, but most Marxists seem to have fossilized a 1930 / 1890 definition.
A high proportion of the working class producing for the American market are aliens without American political rights — either resident in exporting nations, or legally or illegally resident in the US. That’s a lot of what neoliberalism / globalization are all about. A lot of the traditional American-citizen working class has been obsoleted and is a vestigial survival
And there are also huge numbers of service workers and public / non-profit employees.
And finance is firmly in the saddle.
Back to the Emersonians Gibran and Suzuki. Both were successfully bicultural. Gibran write in English and Arabic and is genuinely popular in both languages, and his writing has major influences from both sides of the line. In addition, in English he is widely hated by the wise heads.
Suzuki also wrote successfully for both audiences. Gary Snyder has suggested that he picked things up from the wrong end, and emphasized Zen freedom when writing for Americans and Zen discipline when writing for Japanese, whereas what Americans need is discipline and what Japanese need is freedom.
POC creates a supposed group with no commonality except the fact that racist white Americans hate them
That is a useful term, when addressing that shared experience (or potential experience). Call it “discriminatable”.
Sure, it has a specific use in American politics, as the name of a group defined by a specific interest. And in fact, people lumped in this group sometimes do develop a degree of shared identity after living in the same neighborhoods and doing the same kinds of jobs. But outside the borders of the US it is meaningless, and even in the US it is sometimes used to suggest a commonality which just isn’t there.
In particular, Democratic strategists pencil in POC as part of their majority-to-be, when POC are really a large number of distantly related groups who do not necessarily vote as POC.
whether Egyptians are “African.”
One could make a case that Jews are of African descent.
The Bible says so in the Book of Exodus.
It wouldn’t even occur to me to question what ‘race’ (whatever that might mean) the poet is. Who cares?
In the 1990s, it seems to have mattered very much whether a poet was a Serb or a Croat.
@SFReader: Everyone is of African descent, if you go back far enough.
I am really struggling with the idea that Egyptians aren’t African, despite everyone else apparently finding it obvious.
(The question of whether they could be African-American did finally make me go ‘oh, I see where you’re coming from’, at least, but I remain unconvinced.
I think that Egyptians think of themselves as Egyptians, not as Arab or African. I could be wrong there.
I am really struggling with the idea that Egyptians aren’t African, despite everyone else apparently finding it obvious.
It’s not a geographical question (in which case it would be obvious) but a cultural/historical one; I agree with Y that Egyptians think of themselves as Egyptians, not Africans, and historically they have been seen as part of the Mediterranean/Levantine world rather than the “African” one (whatever that has meant over the centuries).
In other words, as with so many other fraught issues there is no One Right Answer.
The notion of a distinct continent, defined as a part of the earth separated from others by a large expanse of water, comes out of what is easy or not easy for people to navigate across. The Sahara Desert is a barrier as hard to cross as the Mediterranean, at least in these modern times of boats and camels. It makes sense to think of the part south of the Sahara as a different land from the north, even if the boundaries are not so clear.
That was why Scania was Danish first: Forests vs water.
With Egypt, there is a local national identity that goes back a long way. Because of the importance of Islam in the region, there are a lot of states outside the original Arab homeland for which Arabic has become the everyday language. As a result, a lot of North Africans and Levantines do, however, seem to view themselves as fundamentally Arab, even when they have a lot of interesting local culture. Places that were, in relatively recent times, more closely connected to Europe (like Lebanon and Algeria, although the histories of intercommunication with the European world are obviously quite different) tend to have less Arabized identities, particularly among their elites.
The situation in Egypt is more complicated, in part simply because Egypt is a much more populous and politically important country. The strongest indigenous culture in Egypt is found, not surprisingly, among the (culturally) Christian minority, who make up about nine or ten percent of the population. Without the use of Arabic as a liturgical language, the Coptic Christian community has been able to maintain their linguistic ties to older Egyptian civilization, and these Christians are often among the strongest Egyptian nationalists—advocates for the unique Egyptian identity.
Really, there is nothing new about Egypt maintaining a very particular character, even when part of a larger cultural or political entity. In Roman times, Egypt was among the least Romanized parts of the empire, and that was by design. Egypt had a large population and produced an enormous amount of food, making the province potentially economically and militarily self-sufficient in a way that other regions may not have been. Augustus forbade patricians and other Romans of Senatorial rank from traveling to Egypt without his permission and the governors he name for the province were equestrians. These practices continued for some time, and on occasions when higher-ranking Romans did pass through Egypt, it did sometimes cause political problems. Germanicus visited Egypt near the end of his life, although even in Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome—which, of course, is heavily biased against against Tiberias—the import of the situation is not entirely clear.
In I, Claudius, Graves makes a great deal out of this episode in which Germanicus visits Egypt as part of his tour through the East without writing to Tiberias for permission; it is one of several happenings that turn Tiberias more and more against Germanicus. Claudius, narrating, states that Germanicus’s motives were entirely innocent; he was in haste due to problems in the province and may have thought it unnecessary anyway to ask permission of Tiberias, who was legally his father. (On the other hand, while Graves’s Claudius is generally a good historian, he is not omniscient and not a disinterested observer here, either—his elder brother Germanicus being, besides Augustus himself, the individual that Claudius most admires.)
Much later, under the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was often governed more or less independently, first under the Mamluks and then under the Khedival dynasty. Mohammed Ali fashioned Egypt into an effectively independent state, although ironically, he and other Albanian forces were originally dispatched to Egypt by the Sublime Porte in order to bring the region more fully under Ottoman control. After the fall of the Ottoman empire, his dynasty continued to rule Egypt until they were overthrown after the Second World War.
Tiberias > Tiberius, passim.
I have a book of Coptic art From the period between the weakening of the Roman power and the Arab conquest. The apparent succession was Alexandrian Greek – Coptic – Muslim. Alexandrian Egyptians were Hellenized; I’m not sure to what extent Alexandrian Greeks were Egyptianized / Coptified.
Linguistically Egypt is called Misr by the locals, just as Greece is called Hellas. We Romans must keep the strange peoples in there place by naming them with exonyms.
And the Teutons / Deutsch too. Never forget the Battle of Teutoberg Forest!
More seriously, in American prejudice, which is what we’re talking about here, “African” and “black” primarily mean the American descendants of American slaves, and Egyptians aren’t much like them. (Neither are Ethiopians, in my experience, who are sort of like Copts and played a major role in Egyptian history. But let’s not go too far into the weeds.
I’m not sure to what extent Alexandrian Greeks were Egyptianized
Αχ, Μισιρλού…
(αχ, για χαμπίμπι, αχ, για λε-λέλι, αχ)
“Egypt” is not altogether an exonym: it comes from an Egyptian name for Memphis:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Egypt
“Copt” is of the same origin, of course (via Greek.)
On the other hand, “Misr” is an exonym, being the Semitic word for “Egypt.”
Obviously the only proper thing to do is to call the place Ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, as Amun intended.
Αχ, Μισιρλού…
The foundation stone of surf music.
I could swear I’d posted about “Misirlou,” but it seems not.
I could swear I’d posted about “Misirlou,” but it seems not.
I though the same:) Namely, that it is a kind of thing LH must have a post about but for some reason I feel that there is not such a post.
—
I have a special place in my heart for people who make edits like these:
“Lyrics: delete section… Wikipedia is not a lyrics repository”
“Reverted good faith edits by Mathematicalphysicist (talk): Revert… I see no sources for this material to show that it is important .”
“Reverting unsourced changes and reintroduction of previously removed errors”
Aha, I was remembering this MetaFilter post from 2007. You’d think I would have posted it here, but no.
and historically they have been seen as part of the Mediterranean/Levantine world rather than the “African” one (whatever that has meant over the centuries).
It is an interesing question, actually, how Hausa imagined geography 300 years ago and to which extent the idea of a continent Africa existed for them.
But hardly it existed for Hottentots and their and Hausa’s “worlds” did not overlap. Possibly the same is true for modern African nations, it is hard to say for me. How do people of Kenya and Tanzania see their distances to 1.India 2. Arabia 3. Namibia?
Egypt is just situated on the border. If your “world” is a circle around you, it necessarily includes areas to the north-east. The relative role of directions could change: e.g. when Egypt was ruled by Kushites, they could have looked towards the south more often. Or now, when they’re arguing over the dam with Ethiopia:) On the other hand there are Sudanese Arabs. These can be pulled out of Africa by affinity to Arabian Arabs.
There’s an ancient sea trade between E Africa and Asia, one between India and Madagascar, etc. and one between Ethiopia, etc. and W India. The Greeks knew about the trade with India but were excluded from it fairly early in the Christian era. The Greek / Roman / European understanding of the Indian Ocean became second hand and legendary, and some thought that Ethiopia and India had a land connection. Ethiopia was the final place that they looked for Prester John, IIRC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_trade
In terms of sheer diversity, “Africa” = “Eurasia.” How much kinship does a Frenchman feel with an Uyghur?
(Answer: depends very much on the Frenchman. Some Frenchmen rightly feel that they share a lot culturally with the Uyghur: not least, their religion.)
The hard division between “North Africa” and “West Africa” that people seem to be taking as basically commonsensical, though: that is quite at variance with the actual history of West Africa. The idea of the Sahara as an impassable barrier in the times before the European invasions (yup, invasions) is itself a Western construct.
One example among many: the Songhay empire was taken down by Moroccans. The descendants of the invaders live in Mali to this day and have the clan name Touré; they have a traditional “playmate” joking relationship with the Maiga, who are the clan of the original Songhay rulers of the empire.
There were Jewish tribes in the desert before the Bani Hilal came. I used to encounter the occasional blue-eyed northern Ghanaian …
Prince George of Makuria in what is now Sudan (“Land of the Blacks”), whose court was probably Greek-speaking, went to Baghdad to renegotiate the Baqt (a Latin loanword) with the Muslims …
There are native Arabic speakers in Nigeria, and have been for centuries …
The Hausa word for “paper” is of Latin origin (via Berber); the Fulfulde word for “book” comes from Greek …
(Answer: depends very much on the Frenchman. Some Frenchmen rightly feel that they share a lot culturally with the Uyghur: not least, their religion.)
Someone brought several cassettes with Flamenco to Xinjang Uyghur region back in 80s, and they began to spread among locals… Not like rock recordings here (when people were copying their freinds tapes) I think, because they could be sold openly there. But not unlike that too.
Anyway, now Flamenco is one of major influences in local music.
Most of what I’ve said about Africa / black here is about American folk ideas and beliefs about the two terms, and the history of these ideas and beliefs . These ideas are not entirely unrelated to the realities of Africa, but it’s a pretty distorted relationship and these ideas are not misleading outside the US except insofar as American racial ideas have been internationalized, eg through moves (which I have seen in Taiwan).
This is not to say that non-Americans don’t have their own prejudices and distortions. But I think that a lot of discourse including left discourse takes American folk categories as more real internationally than they are.
@Y: You can see that I have been thinking more about the classical history of Judean than of Rome itself lately.
Given that the last people born as slaves in the US lived well into the lifetime of most Hatters
About ten years ago there was an uproar in the Russian blogosphere when a blogger claimed that when she was young she had a nanny who used to be a serf.
Since serfdom was abolished in 1861, it seemed highly unlikely. But it turned out that the blogger in question was a senior citizen born in 1920s and she indeed had an elderly peasant woman as a nanny who was born in 1850s.
There’s an ancient sea trade between E Africa and Asia, one between India and Madagascar, etc. and one between Ethiopia, etc. and W India.
This is why I used them as an example: in some ways they are closer to India… or were so. But I do not know if they see it this way today. Also, much of ancient history happened before the Bantu expansion. People who lived on that coast 2000 years ago were unlike the modern inhabitants in appearance, language and the way of life.
Enthic composition of many modern cities and region changed seriously, over recent decades what to say about 2000 years?
but were excluded from it fairly early in the Christian era
I did not know.
“ Ethiopia was the final place that they looked for Prester John, IIRC. ”
But is not it the most obvious location for it?
David E: It’s a matter of degree. Some parts of the Sahara are more crossable than others, but you need to know what you’re doing, or the cassowaries will get you. In that way it’s not all that different than crossing the Mediterranean (we’ll discuss the sea cassowaries some other time.) In both cases it’s more technical than following roads along the coast of southern Europe or of West Africa, where water, food, shade, and people are never very far away. No?
Y, I think about seas as roads (inspired by similarity of many customs on opposing shore) but it can be oversimplification.
—
I wrote elsewhere that Persia was a neighbour of Russia when Volga was a highway – and drifted farther from us in the epoch of airplanes.
Here we have another complication: apart of “accumulating” influences (proportionally to accessibility) there is a competition between them. Absolute numbers (the time to get to Persia*, coast of getting there, number of people and goods moved) likely go up. Relative numbers went down, Spain is maybe even closer.
And yet it the ‘increaced’ distance is not wholly illusory: perhaps we are less likely to borrow some things from each other today than we were back then, because we borrow this stuff elsewhere.
—
*correction: the time went down
in American prejudice, which is what we’re talking about here, “African” and “black” primarily mean the American descendants of American slaves, and Egyptians aren’t much like them. (Neither are Ethiopians
Back in the day of “race science”, IIRC, Carleton Coon decided that calling all sub-Saharan Africans inferior was a bit too much. Ethiopians and Khoisan and so on were just fine; the ones lacking in civilizational creativity or whatever were basically just the ones from the Atlantic side of Africa. By an astounding coincidence, that subgroup corresponded exactly to the ones his ancestors were most likely to have enslaved.
Iran drifted away from Russia due to the Cold War similarly to Turkey.
Turkey got much closer to Russia since 1990s, but Iran didn’t due to the rigid Islamic regime there.
Russians won’t visit a country where alcohol is not sold freely and girls can’t wear bikini at the beach.
I think Mosaddegh turned to Russia for support, but we did not support it.
I do not know why (I think, it was on the wrong side of the Treaty of Tordesillas?)
Assorted catch-up comments…
I am really struggling with the idea that Egyptians aren’t African, despite everyone else apparently finding it obvious.
The thing, as I understand it, is that Egypt is very obviously Middle Eastern, and if your conception of the Middle East does not allow an intersection with Africa, then it automatically follows that Egypt isn’t African.
In any case, IIRC, the western and southern borders of Egypt are essentially (nigh-)impassable deserts anywhere except narrow strips directly adjacent to the seas and/or the Nile.
(Admittedly to an extent the same is true of Egypt’s other borders – it’s just that most of them are either on, or very close to, a sea.)
Linguistically Egypt is called Misr by the locals, just as Greece is called Hellas. We Romans must keep the strange peoples in there place by naming them with exonyms.
And the Teutons / Deutsch too. Never forget the Battle of Teutoberg Forest!
The locals called it Ta-Kemet, and whatever that came up to in Coptic. (Ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, apparently.) IIRC Misr(ayim) is a translation of this, though.
I’m reminded of the theory (discussed on LH at some point, I believe) that made Germani a Latin rendering of the endonym of a tribe that called themselves “brothers”.
More seriously, in American prejudice, which is what we’re talking about here, “African” and “black” primarily mean the American descendants of American slaves, and Egyptians aren’t much like them.
Which had led to some dispute over whether Barack Obama qualified as black, as his primary African ancestry was direct, recent, and unrelated to American slavery.
(At some point a genealogist managed to figure out that Barack Obama Jr. probably did have an ancestor who was an enslaved African in what became the Thirteen Colonies – but likely only one, in the 17th century.)
“Egypt” is not altogether an exonym: it comes from an Egyptian name for Memphis
Specifically, H(a)ikuptah “the temple of Ptah”. That’s some synecdoche for you!
Memphis apparently has several different names, most of which derive from various landmarks around the city (“Memphis” itself is the pyramid of Pepy I). It’s like if New York was occasionally called “Statue of Liberty” or “Empire State Building” or “Times Square”.
In both cases it’s more technical than following roads along the coast of southern Europe or of West Africa, where water, food, shade, and people are never very far away.
West Africa as usually understood (south of what is now Mauritania), yes, though maybe not necessarily very close to the actual coast.
But north of that the Sahara extends pretty much right up to the sea (in particular, in what became the Spanish Sahara, now occupied by Morocco).
I wrote elsewhere that Persia was a neighbour of Russia when Volga was a highway
Ditto Crimea (and the rest of the Black Sea area) resp. Don (and Dnieper). Of course later on Russia conquered what is now Krasnodar Krai and that particular point became moot.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Svyatoslav Igorevich successfully established his intended capital of the Rus in Pereyaslavets-on-the-Danube (now probably in Romania), and then didn’t get killed on his way back to Kiev.
For the historically minded, Sudan (including the currently independent South Sudan) used to be part of Egypt until quite recently – 1958 or something.
Now, the Sudanese (both North and South) are surely African by anyone’s definition.
anyone’s definition
I am not sure. Some may want to link Arabs to other Arabs (though I treat Boers as “South African tribe”) – or to contrast them to, say, Nuba (by Riefenstahl)
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/08/01/world/01sudan/merlin_158732007_b0f6f96d-83f7-44b4-9b3d-0af7a08949b9-superJumbo.jpg
A crowd of protesters in Sudan.
In America, 99% of people on the photo would be classified as Black.
The South Sudanese, of course, are some of the darkest skinned people on the planet.
-burg, “fortified place” rather than “mountain”.
Suebi, related to sib(ling) in some way.
Buryats were called in the Russian documents of 17-18th century “Bratskie liudi” (literally “Brotherly people”).
Sometime later it was decided that they are Buryats, not Brats. But the older spelling still survives in the name of the city of Bratsk on Angara river.
The hard division between “North Africa” and “West Africa” that people seem to be taking as basically commonsensical, though: that is quite at variance with the actual history of West Africa.
Yes, but we’re not talking about the actual history of West Africa, we’re talking about how “Africa” has historically been perceived by those from elsewhere (and by the Egyptians, who as far as I know have never, under whichever historical circumstances, felt much kinship with the Mande, Mbenga, or Xhosa). Once you start talking about actual history, wie es eigentlich gewesen, you get into all sorts of trouble.
The truth is out there …
I prefer the macro-areal perspective of Tom Gueldemann, for whom Africa’s northeastern boundary is the Zagros Mountains. Linguistically, that makes rather more sense than making it stop at Sinai 🙂
Such a notion, however, would surely have horrified the Phoenicianist contingent discussed in the article. When Arabic speakers start talking about their ancient Mediterranean identity, the point is almost always to find a way to be European…
I like it!
Ah, a biogeographer.
The first Prester John was an actualTurkish or Mongol Christian prince who was supposed to save Christendom from Islam. The legend lasted so long that they ended up having to posit a son of the priginal Prester John to be the savior of Christendom. The Christians of Kerala in S. India were next as I remember. Then the Christians of Ethiopia,
On the steppe there were resident Christians, Manichaeans, Jews, and Buddhists before Islam swept in. No Hindus to my knowledge except itinerant traders.
Ah, a biogeographer.
He’s more of a geolinguist, but now you mention it, the “Western Palaearctic” corresponds rather well to the kind of area that all this talk of classical civilization and Mediterranean unity seems to be pointing towards.
Zagros Mountains
Using recent language distributions, I presume. Or is Sumerian an African language?
Sumerian is just KONGO written in cuneiform.
Sumerian is just KONGO written in cuneiform.
Yes, using the KONGO method of VILU VILU, we can see that the root of ???????????? KI.EN.GI is KONGO.
Sumerian is well-known to be closely related to Kanuri: they both share the rare order Possessed Possessor-Gen.
More seriously, it’s not as if it’s known to be related to any Eurasian languages either, so why not?
Zagros
Then the Caucasus is a continent (which once was wider: cf. the attempts to connect Hurro-Urartian to NE Caucasian. Africa expanded and squeezed it, creating the mountains.)
German has DET Possessed DET-Gen Possessor-Gen. Clearly Sumerian used to be everywhere.
(…well, either that, or it’s a consequence of the genitive having died out in most of spoken German – a calque of DET Possessed Of DET-Dat Possessor-Dat.)
The “Western Palaearctic” is FWIW not too bad a fit for the geographical range circa 1492 of the ancestors of those human beings currently considered “white” in a U.S. context per the official federal bureaucratic definition, and much of the lack of perfect fit can be accounted for by the arbitrary and disputed location of the border between it and the Eastern Palaearctic.
As I noted on a different thread, such flamboyant, lewd lekking birds as the ruff/reeve and the capercaillie breed in the Palaearctic.
Not suggesting anything, just reporting the facts.
THe picture in Wikipdea excludes Iran, and I think the reason is political.
I do not mean politicized authors. Anything in the range from “they did not want to work in Iran/with Iranian colleagues” to “Iran did not allow them”. But only politics could put the border there. I wonder though if there is a natural border between the Eastern and Western PA.
I wonder though if there is a natural border between the Eastern and Western PA.
If there is there’s a good chance it would be better described as Northern and Southern. “Som ikke ender før i Stillehavets bølger, / ved Vladivostok.”
EDIT: as it happens, the current southern border of Russia seems likely to be a good approximation.
For some purposes, the desert of Central Asia, the deserts and rather dry highlands of Iran and the Tibetan plateau form an effective barrier – which, moreover, is a lot more effective during ice ages, and most of the last 2 million years has been ice ages. But pretty much everything that is cold-tolerant enough to bypass them on the north side (in interglacials) has done so, except tigers and leopards.
I hadn’t realised that this thread had slipped back into the ‘defining Africa’ debate that started at “Illiteracy in Africa”.
At that thread I was quite critical of Smith’s use of “Africa” as I saw it as a politically motivated concept for advancing his own particular cause. That doesn’t mean that I deny the concept of Africa as a continent, to the extent that the division into continents is meaningful, but the categorisation of geographical areas as rigidly belonging to a particular continent doesn’t make much sense to me.
It makes more sense to see the globe as consisting of overlapping areas, each area a focus of its own particular world, connected and interacting with other areas in different ways. Egypt, for instance, may be geographically located on the continent of Africa, but to dogmatically insist on its “Africanness”, whatever that might mean, doesn’t make much sense. Egypt stands at the centre of its own world, connected to the Mediterranean in the north, West Asia across the Sinai land bridge, and Africa to the west and south. Every area in the world is like that. Even sub-Saharan Africa, which tends to be seen as a monolithic whole in the West (which is a symptom of the problem that Smith is complaining of) consists of different areas, each different to the other.
Japan and Syria are both in “Asia”, but they have little in common apart from being in the “non-European” part of Eurasia (the concept of “non-European” being the real problem). Chechnya is in Europe but probably has less in common with, say, the UK (a European country) than it does with Azerbaijan, which straddles Europe and Asia.
In other words, I regard this as a non-issue, except inasmuch as people tend to be vexed over questions of “what continent a country belongs to”.
To the subject of this post.
In his response to Adonis, Spender chastised him for his “complete disregard for the ancient heritage of Arabic poetry,” finding his “demolition of poetic traditions” too “extremist,” according to the Arabic transcript of the conference. Although Spender criticized British poets for provincialism in dwelling too much on their own pleasant isles, non-European poets were expected to retain “local color,” Creswell writes, if they desired to participate in the circuits of world literature.
I am not totally unsympathetic to Spender’s viewpoint. I will simplify considerably here by suggesting that European modernism organically grew out of Western tradition, while Arabic modernism is a transplant of Western modernism into alien soil, making a complete break with Arabic tradition.
This is similar to how the political, social, and economic vocabulary of the modern West arose organically within the Western tradition, whereas the same vocabulary in East Asia is a translation of Western vocabulary and marks a complete break from East Asian tradition. To trace the etymology and origins of the Western vocabulary is to reach back far into history; to trace the etymology and origins of the same vocabulary in East Asia for the most part means reaching little further back than the translators of the 19th and 20th centuries.
To this extent the new vocabulary in East Asia can be seen as a kind of pale reflection of the Western vocabulary with shallow roots in East Asian tradition.
This leads to Spender’s viewpoint: don’t just copy our stuff; mine your own tradition to create poetry that is relevant to your own history and society.
Of course this is an extreme and simplistic view and imposes a straitjacket on others’ experience. Whether transplanted or not, modernism in Arabic poetry arose in a completely legitimate way within the circumstances that it arose in. The fact that Western poets disapproved of the way it was just copying their own civilisation is understandable in one way, but it is narrow-minded, imposing Western ideas of “what is correct” and denying the authenticity of what these poets were doing and how they arrived there.
I will simplify considerably here by suggesting that European modernism organically grew out of Western tradition, while Arabic modernism is a transplant of Western modernism into alien soil, making a complete break with Arabic tradition.
You’re simplifying to the point of inaccuracy; I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “organically growing out of tradition” anywhere in the world, and it’s certainly never been true of “Europe” (to the extent that such a term makes sense). European modernism was influenced by East Asian traditions in poetry and painting and African traditions in sculpture (at the very least; I don’t know enough to widen the scope), and artists everywhere have had no compunction about taking material from wherever they found it. Spender was simply being an ass (which was his inalienable right, of course).
On the other hand, I strongly agree with your point about the globe “consisting of overlapping areas, each area a focus of its own particular world, connected and interacting with other areas in different ways.” The traditional continents are useful only as geographical terms (and in the case of Europe and Asia, not very useful even there).
I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “organically growing out of tradition”
I made this simplification in order to demolish it, but perhaps I phrased it unwisely. What I wanted to suggest is that modernist poetry in English (representing the West), while definitely influenced by outside cultures, shows a continuity with the tradition of English poetry even as it tried to break from that tradition. Eliot, for one, was notorious for his references to pre-modern poetry.
The Arab modernists, on the other hand, appear to have simply started afresh without even a nod to Arabic tradition. This is, again, obviously a simplification, perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, as you suggest, and it is definitely Eurocentric, but I believe it holds at least a grain of truth.
But criticising Arabic modernist poetry because it did not try to establish continuity with its own tradition as Europeans thought it should is a distorted and highhanded attitude that (ironically) is almost hegemonic in its approach. “Modernism has to be like this and you’re not doing it right”. We want you to create Arabic modernist poetry within your own tradition because that’s what we think you should be creating.
One wonders what Spender thought of Khalil Gibran, who on the one hand conformed very successfully to the Western desire for vaguely-exotic-yet-easily-digestable Oriental wisdom from writers of Levantine birth, but on the other had the sort of mass appeal to middlebrow book-buyers that tended to incentivize High-Modernist highbrows to deprecate him as kitschy.
The Arab modernists, on the other hand, appear to have simply started afresh without even a nod to Arabic tradition. This is, again, obviously a simplification, perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, as you suggest, and it is definitely Eurocentric, but I believe it holds at least a grain of truth.
I’m unclear what you’re basing that on. Are you familiar with Arabic tradition to an extent that would allow you to say such a thing? (Spender obviously wasn’t.) If you read Arabic and have read enough traditional poetry to have a good sense of what is and is not based in tradition, then fine, you’re qualified to make such a judgment. If not, not. And in general I would automatically defer to the poets themselves in the matter of how traditional or otherwise they are being; poets tend to be far more alert to the usages and traditions of their language — literary/poetic and otherwise — than other people.
Well, I do not understand how Spender’s “viewpoint” can be discussed with such brutality when all we have is someone’s impresson of someone’s impressions of his words in unknown context on some conference.
“Modernism has to be like this and you’re not doing it right”.
Are we speaking about this:
Anyone who reads the criticism produced by the Shiʿr group, or who examines the list of poets they translated, must be struck by their confident sense of what modernism is and who its major poets are.
?
Well, fine, we’ll be brutal to the hypothetical Spender constructed on the basis of the impression of someone’s impressions that we have available, and stipulate that it may or may not apply to the actual historical Spender. I strongly suspect it does, however.
Are we speaking about this
No, it’s about Spender chastising Adonis for his “complete disregard for the ancient heritage of Arabic poetry.”
I’m unclear what you’re basing that on. Are you familiar with Arabic tradition to an extent that would allow you to say such a thing?
I have no knowledge of Arabic poetry. I am only going on what the quoted passage said. Especially the last paragraph.
Elsewhere I am reading about Owens’ attack on Bei Dao and other “Misty Poets” for not being Chinese enough. Al this seems to me to be a refusal to let writers in Arabic and Chinese participate in contemporary world literature, and this kind of quasi-nationalism is weird as hell coming from a non-national.
Khalil Gibran the Boston Emersonian non-modernist Sufi is very popular in both languages and should not be lightly dismissed.
An earlier LH post discussed the surf song Miserlou, which turns out to have been an international Mediterranean song which the Lebanese American Dick Dale first heard when his uncle played it on the oud.
Let a hundred hybrids bloom.
@LH, my impression was that they are people who produce manifests, discuss what and how and why artists do, see themselves as a part of an international joint effort and meet at conferences.
For me art is what you do because you want to do it. I also understand art arising from communication with your audience and art arising from communication with a small circle of freinds, and that is all I understand. My approach leaves some space for discussions, but not for conferences. These guys seem to be different.
I said: maybe you are right. I meant it. I do not know enough. But it was a conference, a place for discussions. Your anger suggess asymmetry and I do not see what in the text above prevents us from seeing them as peers apart of their different native langauges.
Spender came to Beurut too and on page 9 of the preface to the book I see words “rules of what Shiʿr called ‘world literature’ “.
Your anger suggess asymmetry and I do not see what in the text above prevents us from seeing them as peers apart of their different native langauges.
Seriously? You don’t see any asymmetry between one of the most famous poets in one of the main world languages and an unknown young poet from a tradition virtually no one outside of that tradition was familiar with? Perhaps you also consider Woodrow Wilson and Nguyen Ai Quoc (later better known as Ho Chi Minh) as peers at the Versailles Conference.
Adonis, at least, rather carefully thought through the question of how his work related to tradition. He wrote a long manifesto, “The Static and the Dynamic” (al-Thabit wa-l-Mutahawwil) arguing that conformist Arab traditionalism had at all times been resisted and challenged by innovative poets, and insisting that Abbasid-era poets like Abu Nuwas were in their own way “modernists”. I’m not very fond of Adonis and his enormous ego, or of his exaggerated hostility to tradition, but he’s certainly not a mere imitator of Western models; apart from anything else, he could hardly have attained fluency in the language without a thorough immersion in traditional Arabic poetry.
Thanks, it’s good to hear from someone knowledgeable.
But why would someone with an enormous ego call themself “Adonis”?
Thanks to Lameen for that background.
This is an interesting article about Modern Art as a CIA front:
Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? (The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.)
James Jesus Angleton of the CIA had been the editor of the poetry magazine Furioso and had corresponded with Eliot, Pound, and Cummings. (He was noted for his paranoia and was sometimes thought to be insane). As far as that goes, Hugh Kenner was close to Bill Buckley (as was Angleton) and allowed that he mostly agreed with him on politics. Conservatives (as opposed to Cold War liberals) in the culture world kept low profile for awhile, but there were more of them than you’d think, on both sides of the Atlantic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton
i’d even go a little further than Lameen did, and say that while adonis may be hostile to “tradition” as he defines it, he has built much of his work as part of a specific – millenium-long – lineage of arabic modernism, which he discusses in An Introduction to Arabic Poetics. which makes him a bit hard to place in relation to european modernisms, however much he drew on them. that’s all if i remember right, because while i’ve worked with adonis’ poetry in a number of performance projects, it’s been twenty years since i read any of his critical writing.
and @Bathrobe @JE: we have not yet begun to really reckon with how much the CIA shaped our entire understanding of culture in the second half of the 20th century. if we can follow samuel delany in his Wagner/Artaud so far as to agree that wagner’s work (artistic, critical, and above all ideological) defined what art was for the world that became modern, the CIA has certainly been similarly significant for the world emerging out of modernity.
@LH, it is off-topic but I think I must write before I forgot.
About a month ago I saw a dream (сон): you were reading yet another unfamiliar to me book of yet another familiar to me Russian writer. It was set somewhere to the south or west in the East Slavic area and at some point an author listed common local fruit trees – names mostly funny and unfamiliar (again) to us both. Apparently you shared them in a post. I forgot all of them but one: “свишень-свешень” whose fruit was called свишни.
Some relative of вишня and черешня.
Hah, I love it! I’m glad you remembered and shared it. I’ll have to look for свишни at the market.
I’ve read a fair amount about the topic: “Workshops of Empire” Bennett, about Engle and Stegner and the MFA; “Cold War Modernists”, Barnhisel; “The Culture of the Cold War”, Whitfield; and “Cold War Poetry”, Brunner. These books were illuminating but depressing. It was like finding out about all the skeletons in the family closet, and finding out why everyone in the family behaved so strangely. I grew up in this and apent my life clumsily trying to disentangle myself.
I especially remember being told that all literature with a political message was propaganda and agitprop and scarcely literature at all, and that the approved mainstream writers with their mild dissatisfactions and rebellions were not political but just telling it like it was.
One thing I got out of all this was a gratitude for Laughlin at New Directions, who from the beginning fought the Anglocentrism and provincialism of the dominant message. But he had his reactionary connections too, not only with Pound but also, of all people, William Casey. He succeeded in getting Rexroth a government fellowship to study in France, where Rexroth was surprised to find that his French neighbors (perhaps Communists) were hostile. But Rexroth, over time, moved Laughlin away from the Pound-Angleton camp. (This same program also sent Mingus to Yugoslava, which was a story in itself. The idea was to fight the idea that the US was all Sinclair Lewis philistines).
I’ve never been sure how to feel about all that. Obviously the CIA had a nefarious agenda, but on the other hand they funded a lot of good art. Better that than poisoning people, say I.
Sending Mingus to Yugoslavia was a stunning success.
But there was a constricting effect on topics and themes, and apolitical anticommunism was an obligation for a decade or more. Nelson Algren, William Saroyan, and others were redbaited and had trouble finding an audience.
The New York Intellectuals’ role in this was complex and, to me, depressing. Podhoretz early on sneered at “depression literature”.They sort of wanted to be anti-CP radicals, as did Rexroth, but most of the New York Intellectuals were cold war centrists and many eventually became neocons.
I have a 1960 Village Voice that my ex-wife picked up on a school trip. Sports cars were a thing. The music listings were fantastic — Mingus, Coltrane, Miles Davis et al. (Best music in the history of the world, in my humble opinion). But the restaurant listings were mediocre, on about the level of St. Cloud MN today, and the politics was pretty feeble: New York Reform Democrats + Dave McReynolds (pacifist).
But there was a constricting effect on topics and themes
See, I don’t understand that. So what if you couldn’t publish in Encounter? There were plenty of other venues. So what if you weren’t a best seller? The best stuff rarely is. Sure, the Establishment promoted the work it liked both here and in the Soviet Union; the difference is that in the latter you couldn’t get published if you were disapproved. Don’t tell me that being forced to appear in a little magazine or have your book published by Grove Press is the same thing as being sent to the gulag.
I never said anything about the gulag or even censorship. But education and public opinion directed people toward bland apoliticism, and writers write to market. By the early 60s the control started to slip and by 1970 it was gone. But there was a 15-20 year period of constraint, and those happened to be my formative years.
I even remember the social criticism of the 50s — David Riesman, “The Organization Man”, etc. It was pretty narrow.
As far as that goes, many of the great ages of literature were ages of censorship — the Spanish Renaissance, or Russia the whole time. (You yourself are finding great Russian wrioters againand again). I have even suggested that cnsorchip and repression would be good for American literature.
Contrast Russia 1870-80 and the US 1950. In Russia there was censorship but public opinion was dissident, and some writers learned to write in code intelligible to readers but not to censors. In the US public opinion and most publishers were conformist, but there was no official censorship and whatever government interference there was was was subtle and behind the scenes (the FBI dogged Algren for years).
@lh
I think you may be underestimating the power of social and societal disapproval, that can result from official disapproval or blacklisting. While many artists are avowed free spirits and non-conformists, they have to eat and some of them have families. I do not mean to trivialise the Gulag, just to suggest there are other ways to silence or redirect artists, or to create a climate where “safe” work crowds out “politically unsound” work and forces the latter to the margins.
The only info I can find re Mingus playing in Yugoslavia has it as ’74, ’75, or both, which seems rather late in the day for the CIA’s hipster jazz phase. Was there an earlier visit during the era when Stephen Spender himself was being CIA-funded?
J W: I can’t remember where I learned about Mingus and I can’t answer your question. He was sent there as part of an official, government sponsored cultural exchange, though, I know. The US Ambassador introduced him very nervously. (When Faulkner was sent overseas, his handler was charged with keeping him from getting excessively drunk).
There were many parallel non-CIA programs at this time working more or less in synch with the CIA. For example, Rexroth was sent to France by a non-CIA program (I think), but Bill, Casey was on its board of directors.
I never said anything about the gulag or even censorship.
No, of course not; I was just providing the contrast often ignored by those who demonize the CIA and AmeriKKKa in general. Don’t get me wrong, I hold no brief for the CIA or any of the US security apparatus — I’d like to see it all disbanded. I just think the malign influence of the CIA on the arts is vastly exaggerated by those who like to encourage paranoid excess.
I even remember the social criticism of the 50s — David Riesman, “The Organization Man”, etc. It was pretty narrow.
Me too (I even read The Organization Man as a wee tyke, since my parents had it and I read anything I could get my hands on); I just don’t blame it on the CIA or the government. The roots of ’50s American blandness, conformity, and fear of Otherness are far deeper and need more investigation than I’m aware that they’ve gotten. We used to be a feisty, fearless people by and large; for me, a crucial moment is the US entry into WWI, when the usual mindless patriotic upsurge of support for Our Boys turned into a violent attack on “foreigners” (including people born here who had the misfortune of speaking foreign languages), “anarchists” (anyone who didn’t support God and Wall Street), and other miscreants. The crushing of the Bonus Army showed how far the reaction went. It went underground for a while during and after WWII (nobody wanted to risk being identified with fascism), but it never went away, and now we see the bitter fruit.
I think you may be underestimating the power of social and societal disapproval, that can result from official disapproval or blacklisting.
Not at all, I’m just saying there are worse things. Leftists often fall into the trap of seeing the world in Manichean terms, and are impatient with complexity and vicious to anyone who doesn’t see things in exactly the way they do. I’ve seen both the New York Times and the New Yorker described as “fascist,” for chrissake.
The electrocution of the Rosenbergs (which opens Plath’s “The Bell Jar”) + Joe McCarthy sent a vivid message whose intensity was not diminished by its vagueness. What was forbidden? More than just espionage, but just what> And all under the shadow of nuclear war.
In many areas the U S featured polycentric control as opposed to absolutist central control. So it needs a different analysis.
Update: Mingus earlier played in Belgrade on an overtly-State-Department funded “Newport Jazz festival on the road” thing in 1970, on a bill with Earl Fatha Hines and Anita O’Day. If I’ve got the timeline right, Anita had then fairly recently kicked her long-running heroin habit after a near-fatal overdose, so no one from the Embassy needed to be tasked with helping her score dope while in town. That same year the State Dep’t (overtly, who knows what role the CIA played less overtly) decided to expand its repertoire to that new-fangled rock music the kids seemed to like, as explained in this rather hilarious period piece: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/blood-sweat-tears-turn-backs-on-communism-166146/
The internet advises me that there’s a book-length treatment (and subsequent PBS documentary allegedly “inspired” by the book) of the State Department’s work as a promoter of jazz tours, with only minimal mention of the CIA in the index. But that may just mean that the key stuff hasn’t been declassified yet? You would think the CIA’s role would more have been in facilitating what superficially appeared to be spontaneous/grass-roots/private promotion of jazz in foreign countries of strategic interest, of course.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674022607
The electrocution of the Rosenbergs (which opens Plath’s “The Bell Jar”) + Joe McCarthy sent a vivid message whose intensity was not diminished by its vagueness.
Sure, and my wife’s family suffered badly from McCarthy and his goons. I’m not downplaying any of that, I’m just saying it’s more complicated than “evil people took control in Washington.” McCarthy and his ilk were riding the back of a whole population of nativists who had felt ignored, and when McCarthy was sidelined they just found other champions (from the John Birch Society to you-know-who). The shame of the official GOP and their useful idiots like William Buckley is that they tacitly encouraged the nativists because they knew they needed their support, and then had no defenses left when the nativists grabbed the reins (and guns).
@drasvi: “I forgot all of them but one: “свишень-свешень” whose fruit was called свишни.
Some relative of вишня and черешня.”
Zwischen вишен и черешен, so to say.
I wouldn’t call Buckley a useful idiot. He was best buds with Hugh Kenner after all. Too clever by half, and too benign about the chances of keeping the genie in the bottle.
I am not sure sure what everyone is exercised about. The State department supported export of the American art that have a modicum of public approval and didn’t make people question what they dollars are spent on. And CIA promoted arts that was harder to explain to the American public and therefore was done secretly. But it was a secret from the Americans, the rest of the world couldn’t care less.
If all the State Department / CIA did was send out Mingus, Rexroth, and Faulkner, we wouldn’t be complaining. The complaints are about other things done by the same organizations and related organizations.These arts programs were brought forward to temper the criticisms of those other things.
In further Iron-Curtain-tangent news, Mingus played a festival in Warsaw in ’72 that has reportedly been bootlegged, and it’s probably out there on the internet if I looked a little harder but doesn’t seem to be on youtube. (The youtube clip that claims to be him in Yugoslavia in ’75 is mislabeled and actually from a show in Italy in ’74, I’m pretty confident.) On the other hand youtube does have a nice Warsaw-in-’72 recording of Cannonball Adderley, with the young George Duke in the band doing trippy outer-space things on a Fender Rhodes. Sounds better than Communism!
This?
Interesting, yes, but what a pile of half-edited sentences!
The Editor’s Note at the bottom is hilarious.
This?
Listening to the Preview/Sample now; thanks!
John E.: great Russian wrioters
Quoted for envy.
(Whatever input system you used, please keep it.)
The USA had a large “soft power” program. Internationally that was a good thing. More countries ought to have much more of it.
The problem is that it took place during the Cold War and the ideological climate of the McCarthy era.
Exactly. All countries should promote their values that way! And they should decide who wins via cutting contests rather than wars.
Is LH (the site) also CIA-sponsored soft power?
I do not know why, but I find such a perspective disappointing.
Maybe people who attend conferences on Arabic literature feel differently?
No, no, no CIA money here! I’m kind of surprised they didn’t try to recruit me back when i had an NSF grant to study linguistics, but maybe they’d heard about my participation in antiwar activities.
“Well he would, wouldn’t he.” –Mandy Rice-Davies’ reaction to being told hat had denied being the beneficiary of covert government largesse.
I don’t work for MI5, either.
Of course you don’t, but what’s Welsh for “Military Intelligence”?
Hunan-wrthddywediad.
That’s something an HW5 agent would know right off. Just saying.
Like countless Russians, I received financial support for education abroad from George Soros (and even a small sum from the British Government) in 1990s.
It suddenly worries me a lot that there might be a file in some foreign intelligence archive where I am listed as a potential agent of influence.
That would be bad, but your immediate concern should be not to get on the Russian government’s “foreign agents” list.
“Is that true that Jews sold Russia?” “Yes, that’s correct” “Then tell me, where I can get my share?”
And then to his horror, he hears himself saying without premeditation, ‘Are you a spy, Moura?’…Moura does not reply at once…But then she speaks.
‘Aigee…[ellipsis in original] That is a silly question. Shall I tell you why? Because if you ask that question of someone and she is not a spy she will say “No”. But if she IS [italics in original, not caps] a spy, she will also say “No”. So there is no point in asking that question.’
‘No, of course not,’ he says. ‘Forget I ever asked it.’
‘I have forgotten it already’, she says with a smile…
David Lodge, “A Man of Parts”
“Soft power” and “agents of influence” are really different things, and we need to keep them apart coceptually before we discuss how they interfere in the real world.
Student exchange programs, scientific cooperation, sending art and artists abroad, these don’t constitute an effective channel to promote a nefarious agenda but are essential to build goodwill (and good will). We need more of that. Always.
And then we may discuss the effects (home and abroad) of
A) candidates being vetted politically to avoid spreading “dangerous” thoughts as part of the soft power package.
B) candidates going through security clearance to reduce the risk of recruitment by foreign agencies.
C) “soft power agents” being briefed by intelligence officials before traveling abroad and debriefed during and after the tour to limit and assess risks.
D) “soft power agents” being debriefed systematically to extract information about foreign countries, including e.g. dissenting opinions and oppositional groups.
E) “soft power agents” being trained in (or picked according to adherence to) whatever picture the government wants to promote abroad.
F) “soft power agents” being recruited by national intelligence to actively seek information or identify friendly or dissatisfied citizens of foreign nations for future recruitment.
G) A-F not being kept conceptually distinct by intelligence and security officials in their encounters with “soft power agents”.
Hunan-wrthddywediad
Well, that is what we are told to say when the topic comes up …
@drasvi, alex k
The preferred derivation for Zwetschge in DWDS is ultimately VL. *davascena for (damascus) plum. I had always pegged this as from something like Czech slivečka (where maybe the l was pronounced like ł and the second syllable was stressed).
“Is that true that Jews sold Russia?”
The American version:
“I know there is no worldwide Jewish conspiracy. If there were, my rabbi would certainly have told me about it: God knows I pay enough money to his synagogue!”