The Baby or the Bathwater

Indeed, it is soon clear that [Paul Gauguin] is not just the average Westerner exploring for the sake of broadening his understanding of the world–he is, more than anything, a sexual tourist…The submissiveness of [his young teenage lover] was highly erotic to him.  In Noa Noa he admits to rape fantasies about all the local girls: ‘I saw plenty of calm-eyed young women, I wanted them to be willing to be taken without a word: taken brutally.  In a way longing to rape.”

–from Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life, by Nancy Mowll Matthews (pages 178 and 181)

Realizing that our beloved Gauguin was, contrary to my own ideals, not only racist/imperialist but a pedophile, could have been the death knell for this blog’s endeavor of the past few months. But before that, I may have already hit a personal kind of quarter-life-in-a-racist-and-misogynist-culture crisis. The point where your youthful bouyancy seems no match for the powers that be, no match for the act of walking out your door in this body in this country and having your eyes met or not met, your personhood assumed or overlooked.

In the interests of my own health and survival, I’ve let up for a minute on this blog’s prior quest to condemn or praise creative attempts to represent cultures other than our own.  Nitpicking the glaring de-humanization of non-white “others” in the Western cannon is a little bit masochistic, like continuing to press a fascinatingly purple bruise just to remember that it hurts.

I did note, for example, a really interesting essay and series of photographs by Eudora Welty, who I do love and appreciate and whose work always defiantly humanized those beyond popular margins of personhood.  The essay is called “Ida M’Toy,” and passages like this one jumped out at me:

“Ida M’Toy, an old negro woman, for a long time a widwife in my little mississsippi town, has been a skyrocket as far back as most people remember.  Or, rather, she is a kind of meteor (for she is not ephermeral, only sudden and startling)…I have not much doubt that Ida has come down from a race of tall black queens.  I wish I might have seen her when she was young.  She has sharp clever features, light-filled black eyes, arched nostrils…and her hair, gray now, spring like a kind of wild diadem from the widow’s peak over her forehead.”

Great job!, I thought.  Way to show a black lady as beautiful and powerful and regal, Southern white lady of the pre-civil rights era!

But lately I’ve come to feel that congratulating people on what they very well should be capable of doing–recognizing other human beings–is not only patronizing but backwards. It’s almost the inverse of commending a person of color for being “articulate.” I want to live in a world where it’s a basic assumption that people can find ways to meet each other beyond culture, and to be their best.

So there goes one part of the grounds for that old endeavor. Finishing Dinaw Mengestu‘s delicious new book has me reflecting on something that fiction about the immigrant experience–the ranks of which are home to a disproportionate number of my all-time favorite reads–always raises: that most of us are, inherently and with no particular effort, already cross-cultural. Many of our identities already hinge cultures. Few and fewer of us live in the same square acres as our grandparents. Even for those who do, there’s always a back-and-back-and-back point, an origin elsewhere. By whatever human forces, we’ve been carried as though by wind, sprouted up elsewhere, mingled with who knows what impurities.

What to make of the question of who has the rights to tell what culture’s stories in such a world? From what culture do we even presume to hold a fixed origin?

There is a general shift of direction with me these days, which in some way represents my letting go of the concerns of my last novel for the strange and wild new world of the next.