Please print And read: Nov. 14 Unit 9 Lecture Notes: Moving On: Independence, Nationhood, and Religion.

On Texts: Dionne Brand, "Cuba" Salman Rushdie, "In God We Trust" Concepts: The Nation Imagined Communities, Historic Clock, Secular States, De-Colonization, Independence Struggles. Outline 1. Pre-amble: Sense of dj vu: 1991/2001 2. The Lecture 3. Independence and Nationhood and Nationalism. 4. The Imagined Community: Nation State Nationhood. 5. The National and the Exile Writer:

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1. Preamble: A sense of dj vu. Today I am going to talk about two texts by post-colonial and immigrant writers: Indo-British Salman Rushdies In God we trust, and Trinidad-Canadian Immigrant writer, Dionne Brands Cuba. Before I begin, are there any comments? Mak: When I looked at the date of Rushdies article I could not believe that you wrote it ten years before 9/11. It is amazing that Rushdie writes about Islamic fundamentalism, and the American adding the Moslem peril to the yellow and red The problem is with our nations collective memory. Events and phenomena such as fundamentalist Islam and 9/11 did not just come from no-where. Rushdie essay tries to correct that absence of memory. He reminds us that fundamentalism in Iran was related to the Iranian independence from monarchical and dictatorial rule, and its path toward modern nationhood. In the colonized period, when there was no official political body representing the colonies, religion grew stronger. Linda: My memory is working well. There was, I learned in school, the SovietAfghanistan war! The US supported the Talibans struggle for Afghanistan independence, and the Soviets in the end pulled out. His articles main argument is that even state governed by religious leaders, is a nation-state, and that the nation state is, since it was first pioneered in the European nations, here to stay. The war between Iraq and Iran proves this to Rushdie. That religious battle and terrorism continue has to him more to do with de-colonization of former colonies, than with religion. Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth, which states that national independence is followed by the most violent and bloody religious conflicts might have been on Rushdies mind. The authors condemnation through the fatwa in 1988-9m explains, if anything, American reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 when absolute panic entered average apolitical Americans heart. They had been alerted to a Moslem peril for more than a decade. Linda: I thought Rushdie was a bit like Tillich like Tillich, Rushdie also talks about the difference in conception of time between that of the religious and secular nations walk on.

As Rushdie points out, the nations time is purely secular, material. Today, however, there is in his view no truly religious nation which has the messianic sense of time: being between two eternities. To talk of revival, a religion must already think that religion has changed in the Nation some recognition of things moving forward, and revived, has made its way from the nation into religion. Linda: Though he seems to be criticizing Khomeini he is also accepting him as a national leader. I think he is saying, nations are out of the bag and have to be lived with. Religion makes no difference to that fact. 2. The Lecture Rushdie and Brand came from the newer nations: India (1947) and Trinidad (1959) peoples who demanded independence, fought for it, and gained it and began being a nation: tick tock tick tock now autonomous masters of their own history. From here on these peoples would be the subject of what happens and not the object of which the greatest theorist of decolonization ever, Frantz Fanon: Victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it: when I was present, it was not. (The Fact of Blackness) But Salman Rushdie and Dionne Brand are exiles and foreigners to their present countries in which they actually live: their chosen home, Britain and Canada respectively. What separates them from their present home is their split sense of belonging and memory. They feel cut in two, and seek to heal the cut. In an essay, entitled, Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie tells how, in his lost city Bombay (now Mumbai), he went to visit the house in which he grew up, of which he had a black and photograph. Once he stood in front of it, his he was overwhelmed, his two eyes assaulted by colors How much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded grays of old family-alum snapshots Bombay is a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed landI, too, had a city and history to reclaim. It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledgewhich gives rise to profound uncertainties---that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely that thing that was lost that they are homelands of the mind. (9-10) Rushdie and Brand, unlike the other essayists read so far in our course, are living in one nation while feeling only alive when linked to the ticking of the clock of the homeland. For the rest of their lives, these writers are not only feeling dis-placed, but placed on hold -- they must forever use their mind and their pen to connect themselves to that national clock that was (not completely mysteriously) implanted in them in childhood through narratives repeated at home and in school, not necessarily consistent or uplifting. The connection between the two is also that Rushdie and Brand came from the newer nations: India (1947) and Trinidad (1959) peoples who demanded independence, fought for it, and gained it and began being a nation: tick tock tick tock. They entered history: only possible for the autonomous masters of their collective, national, destiny. No longer would they say with Frantz Fanon: Looking at history, it spoke of me but I was not there. In the case of Rushdie, the homeland narrative begins with the struggle for independence; in the case of Brand, the

narrative moves from colonization by her majestys government to independence, and the rival leaders of the free nation. Time in the homeland is ticking away while Brand is in Toronto, while Rushdie receives prizes for his novels set in India. Their predicament fits well into the titles of Daisy AlAmirs works: The Distant Land You Love, On the Waiting List. They are, like millions of exiles, migrs and expatriates, in limbo, as if in a waiting room at the airport, with no relationship to that nations time, waiting to return and rejoin the time and flow and movement of their homeland. 3. Independence and Nationhood and Nationalism. What is independence if not wanting to be a nation like other nations: having your own constitution, your own language, everything. For Rushdie, Indias de-colonization was emphatically based on the idea of a secular nationhood: the secular was the condition for tolerating other religions. Gandhi did not privilege any religion above another. This condition was perpetuated by Nehru. Moslems could live and work alongside the Hindu majority. Mak: But doesnt Rushdie criticize secular society? Doesnt he say that the nations are only held together by material interests and goals? That means, people have to turn to religion for answers, and they do. There does seem to be a contradiction here. I think Rushdie is not religious but sympathetic to the needs of people for religion. He believes that religion can make the ultimate promise without ever losing brand loyalty especially if its ethic is one of submission, humility and suffering. He realizes that nationalism has a shallower identity than religion no doubts: citizenship, constitutional rights, liberalism are not providing answers to he meaning of life. However, beginning with Gandhi in India, the flame of nationalism, as the creation of autonomous nations with their own constitution, run by their own men and women, ignited the colonized peoples across the globe. Dionne Brand makes the nationalist swoon and excitement for Trinidads independence come alive to us in her childhood perspective on C.L.R. James (a brilliant Marxist intellectual, a scholar and a national treasure lacking academic credentials, and Eric Williams, Oxford educated and a published writer, with his own rebellious :anti-colonial, mocking staccato (25) the battle between the two decided by Williams (advocating Trinidadian Black nationalism) simply not banning his rival C.L.R. James (architect of the Pan-African Congress) from returning to his homeland. Brand makes it all too clear that it was possible for Trinidad to become a nation, but impossible for it to choose its own political theory of government. America blurred the reality of the world-wide struggles for independence by mobilizing the concept of the yellow peril1in Vietnam, another nation wishing independence, from French Colonialism. Today it is widely agreed that the Vietnam was primarily a nationalist struggle for independence and self-determination. 4. The Imagined Community: Nation State and Nationhood. Throughout Rushdies article there is one message: today (and even more in the future) no society is outside or beyond the structure that is known as the nation state. What actually is a Nation State, and where did it come from? Typically, the nation state is imagined as the community. We have of ourselves as members of a nation,
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The spread of Communism from China.

Rushdie says. But its more than that: it is imagined horizontally, sort of flattened out over a territory; with individual citizens who, though they might never meet face to face, consider themselves part of this imagined (not imaginary) community. Wherever a nation was born, constitutions were drafted and signed, writers wrote national histories and anthems, national flags were sewn and waved, national services like the post office or the military With exception to France and England, Benedict Anderson says, that the nation who became constitutionally and was an artefact not a tradition but electorally reformed nations, in the invented ad hoc (Latin, meaning for early 19th century (1814 and 1828-32 now. The first nation so created was respectively); most nation states were France. The model is highly compelling to created around the1860s. It meant imitation. It was first exported to England unifying several provinces or states and from there went triumphantly to the under one flag, currency, constitution, rest of the world (see box on the right), army, citizenship. in France, US (1864), with the more recent example in Croatia Canada (1867) Japan (1868) and Germany (1870) By the end of the and Slovenia, or the Czech Republic. 19th centuries most nationalists The sinister side of nationalism is that it is believed that a nation could only been based on shallow philosophical a nation if it had mingled shed blood in imaginings and invented history. a war. Such a war would test every Rushdies dilemma as a nationalist is that citizen as a patriot and gallant when he loses his religion, something that protector of his country. leaves a gap in his being, he has not much that can replace it, except history (which always changes). All the great inspiring humanitarian platforms the founding of the better world in the future, seem no longer worth pursuing, and modern nations dont even bother. Many of the European nations felt in the 1880s and 1890s that only a blood sacrifice of citizens recruited into the army and sent into the battle field would consolidate the newly created nations (often federations of formerly separate states and countries) into a genuine German or Italian (etc.) community. America had already undergone that blood-struggle in the Civil War. But European nations were eager to provoke a similarly galvanizing conflict in which citizens would be mobilized and led to the First World War with its stream lined military hardware and dispatching of millions of soldiers. Brand seems to be investigating the nation and nationalism as it emerged through Trinidads decolonization. What happened to the great vision of self-empowerment, the end of the colonialist values of lighter skin? Feeling an overwhelming bond with her earliest childhood home, and the hope represented by political change, she suspected the overwhelming nature of colonialism. She observed the middle-classes short-lived attention span on the ethical, with convictions about being reborn and starting new being only skin deep. Communism was such an ethical teaching that it could not inspire long commitment. It was a synonym for something impossible to practice. With her impeccable humor, she invites us to smile: Anyone who was serious or steadfast they called a communist. They would say, he is a communist, you know, so dont try nothing, or You see my face? I is a communist, dont play with me, or You lucky I is not a communist, you get away. (23) After the Missile Crisis, when Cuba could only stay independent by being backed by the Soviets, Cuba faded in my family after that, as if it had left the planet. (23)

5. The National and the Exile Writer: Nations and nationalism are the framework and artifact however that organizes the modern world but cannot provide the satisfactions of particular belongings offered. And this causes a bit of a predicament for Brand and Rushdie. All the writers we read until now, like us, the readers, write and read as part of an imagined (not imaginary) nation and homeland. Examples: James Orwell, Martin Luther King Jr., E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, wrote in the context of an imagined community be it England or America. There is reference to historical time as well as the personal time of the narrator. While White was growing up and becoming a father the nation was ticking away and he was part of it. He and the reader presume this image of time and place in modern times. It makes the trip to the lake in the past for us. In the background of Dionne Brands Cuba, is the ticking clock of the Trinidadian nation it has stayed and lives have moved on forward, and the oldest uncle has remained unchanged all that time. Poverty and sating on easy ways out and falsehoods are as much part of that ticking on as is her oldest uncle, taking a plane for the first time to Granada. The individual life, though far away and displace, attempts to live, literarily, in the imagined community of Trinidad, feels alive when she hears the clock tick, her pulse moving in its rhythm. Things are happening. To Rushdie, and making sense, even the nations who deny the clock, for example, the Iranian leader who spoke of the Iranian revolution as a Revolt against History cannot remove events from the clock of the Nation State. To speak of a return or revival means to acknowledge that shared movement of the imagined community. As said, Rushdie is sympathetic to religion but not for reasons of faith but for understanding the predicament of living in a liberal world where every religion is considered nothing more than a subjective experience, against which he cannot argue. . Please scroll down for the Forum Nine Seminar Discussion Forum Questions.

1848 Reproduction showing March for a German Nation as guarantee of civil liberty
media H.D. entropicbits.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/imagined-communitiesconstructed-through-media-deconstructed-through-global-

Nov. 14 - Forum Nine Seminar Discussion Topic, Brand & Rushdie posted Nov. 15 1. Dionne Brand wonders how people could see daily color prejudice and poverty and not feel sated, as she did when eating candy with her stolen 25 cents. (Cuba, 88,91) Is it true, as she seems to feel, that the formerly colonized have given up on de-colonization? Was there ever any real hope? 2. Moving away from the home land, as did Rushdie and Brand, seems to lead to some kind emptiness, a sense of loss. Is it possible or impossible for a multi-cultural nation-state with large-scale immigration (Canada, Britain, US, for example) to provide a substitute for this loss of imagined community. 3. Any comment on the two texts and/or lecture notes.