I found myself shaking in my Contemporary Literature class yesterday, when we were “discussing” Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
And I put the word discussing in quotation marks, because it really wasn’t a discussion. It was really just a bunch of people talking without thinking, dissecting without knowing, and reaffirming instead of challenging.

Case in point: someone pulled out the stock reading of the female body as territory to be marked. English has a number of stock theories that you pick up after studying it long enough, and most of these theories can be applied to most literature, which is why they’re so popular among the unthinking. Let me first say that that particular theory can be successfully applied to various parts of The Color Purple – not, however, as was attempted, in the case of Tashi and the scarification. At least, it does fit (seeing Tashi’s scarification as a metaphor for the marking of national territory), but only if you ignore one important fact: that scarification is something both men and women undergo. In fact, male tattoos are often much more intricate than female ones, but that would boggle the mind of the average reader, who apparently is someone who knows nothing about scarification and who has no qualms talking about it.
Hence the talking without thinking.

But when have we ever had to think before talking about Africa?

And, of course, we talked about the Olinka as though they represented the entirety of Africa – that monolithic continent of darkness. Because we all know, do we not, that South Africa is the same as Zimbabwe is the same as Egypt. Give us one black tribe in Africa and you’ve given us everything we will ever need to know about Africa.

In every other book we’ve studied in the class, we never limited ourselves to the restricted viewpoints of the characters. Doing so goes against every rule in the study of English literature. Instead, we’re encouraged to read between the lines, to criticise the assumptions that define the characters’ experiences, and to adopt the status of omniscience – to become, in other words, one with the author.
And yet in this “discussion,” most people, professor included, took Nettie’s presentation of the Olinkas (and thus, by extension, Africa) as fact. The class ignored it when Walker was being ironic, because it’s just so much easier to accept Nettie’s view of Africa than Walker’s much more nuanced one. And it’s easier to do that because most people in that room think about Africa in the way Nettie does. I am convinced that the majority of the people in that classroom, when they think of Africa, think of starving black kids surrounded by flies. Either that or their ubiquitous white bands, which mark them as good people.

And we talked about female genital mutilation, which Nettie calls “the female initiation ceremony.” I was the first to bring it up, and not wanting to use Nettie’s term for it, called it the first thing that came to mind – female circumcision. The people who followed up in the discussion then used the term I had. And then professor, with smugness seeping through every pore on his face, pointed out that no one called it FGM, which is what it is. He said something to the effect of our being brainwashed by liberal over-corrrectedness.
This is the same professor who began the topic of scarification without having bothered to research the process – I suppose, because he didn’t want to be brainwashed. In fact, at one point he called scarification “destructive” and “violent” – even likened it to Walker’s having been accidentally shot with a BB gun in her childhood.
Now I’m not going to deny that cutting one’s face is pretty painful, even violent and destructive, but using loaded terms like that implies that scarification is nothing like tattooing, which involves hygienic guns and needles and well-lit rooms with whitewashed walls.
And he implied, throughout his discussion that scarification is basically the same thing as FGM, in that they’re both female-specific (which is factually incorrect, but why would he, the professor, need to know that) and painful. That sort of reading would imply that in North America getting raped and and getting a tattoo are the same thing, but of course no one in that class would ever suggest that – and that’s because we all live here, we know this place.
But the professor and most of the students don’t know Africa and didn’t feel the need to know it. What see in the papers is enough for them, so that when they read a novel as nuanced as The Color Purple they only see the grainy images that in their minds (their tiny tiny minds) define Africa.

It’s pretty ironic that this was an English class, where we’re supposedly taught to think in new and creative ways – because all that came out of that class was the same old stereotypes, the same old clichés.

And it’s ironic that we were discussing a novel that is considered with racism. But we have learnt to point out the racism at home. In any case, the racism that defined the events that occur in America in The Color Purple are pretty blatant. No one could possibly pretend otherwise.
But when it came to talking about Africa and Nettie’s inverted imperialism, most people in that class, professor included, were complicit in the racism that continues to define depictions and perceptions of that gigantic continent, despite Walker’s subtleties.
In other words, in order to “discuss” the novel the way they did, they had to ignore Walker, the author, and embrace Nellie, the character – which is something we never did before in any other novel. But then again, no other novel dealt with Africa, which has become the catch-all for every stereotype in the modern world.

That class reaffirmed every bloody stereotype of Africa out there. And dammit, the professor was complicit in it – he even strengthened the stereotypes, which makes me wonder if he has any training in post-colonial theory at all, which one would hope would be required to teach a course on contemporary literature.

Dammit.