“90 percent of humanity is, in fact, imitating 10 percent of humanity.” –Orhan Pamuk
That’s from Pamuk’s interview with Diane Rehms about his (soul-wrenchingly beautifu, if you ask me) book The Museum of Innocence. He was talking about his choice of having his hero’s first encounter with Fusun, the woman his obsessive love will eventually destroy, occur over the issue of a fake handbag.
Orhan Pamuk’s fiction always searches to articulate what, for him, is the divide between East and West. Fault lines shifted, his lines can become dividers between any number of imaginary centers of privilege and their imaginary margins, from which they draw their power. White/Black. Global North/Global South.
Why in the world is someone like me so attracted to questions like these? How important it is, that Black Americans learn to see everything that is at war within us as tied to everything at war in the world. What identity could be more inexorably global, than to be the heirs of people trafficked across the Atlantic from Africa, and the ones who had lived by the rhythms of this land for millenia, and the ones who came from Europe and called themselves owning it all?
RE: Definition 