Dancing With Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact

by Inga Clendinnen

Just finished reading Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. (Lindsay sent me the book for my birthday - thank you Lindsay!) I read the book in two days - I literally could not put it down. It reads like an extremely intriguing novel.

Inga Clendinnen is a historian who has written about the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Holocaust. The current focus of her work is looking at the way different cultures view the world and how these differences play out in relationships between them.

I’ve read several historical works, of course. But I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything with the sensitivity of Dancing with Strangers. I have a completely different appreciation of history now than I did before reading it.

It’s interesting to imagine that race was not an immediate issue between the Native Australians and the British, but developed as the gulf of their mis-understanding of one another widened - both sides expecting the other to be beholden to their laws and understanding of the world. But neither really understanding the laws of the other because of the fog created by their own understanding.

We know how the British felt about the people they came across as they colonized various areas because we have their written record. But we don’t have the written record of the native people of the lands the British colonized. That the British found natives of many lands to be “savage” is clear. That the native people of the lands found the British to be appalling and savage as well is not always as clear. What is especially unclear are the reasons the natives of these lands found the ways of the British so appalling because we tend to exist in our own present day cultural fog when it comes to such an understanding of the past. We can understand peripherally, of course. But to understand with any depth takes a willingness to acknowledge the fog so we can move beyond it for a clearer view.

The main characters are primarily male, with a few accounts given by British females. But there is one Native Australian female character that receives an entire chapter. Barangaroo. I love this woman. She refuses to wear clothes. She wears a bone in her nose - something only males do. Her husband wants her to have her baby in the British Governors home which she seems to agree to. But when the time comes, she has her child by herself in the place of her choosing. She fights back with a vengeance, even though women are regularly beaten by men at the seemingly slightest provocations. Her husband’s beatings, no matter how severe, do not stop her from standing up to him or anyone. At one point, a British convict is being flogged by a British soldier for a transgression against an Australian. Baranagaroo, who is among the appalled Australians watching the flogging, is so outraged at this treatment that she flogs the flogger. What a woman!

I know that there is a tendency to romanticize the native peoples of areas these days which is probably somewhat healthy. But Clendinnen reminds us that it is important to remember that every culture has it’s ugly side. As was true with British females, the role of male and female was most definitely not equal among the Australian tribes. Women seem to have been considered property and were heavily beaten regularly. Sometimes to death.

The British regularly beat and executed the convicts they had brought with them. There are many stories of the white convicts trying to escape this treatment - one group hoping to get to China where they assumed they would be treated more fairly by those who are not white. According to Clendinnen, this has been a common, although not entirely accurate, assumption throughout history.

Clendinnen closes the book with an account from 1839 offered by Mrs. Charles Meredith who explains the various ways “ay” is used amongst the Native Australians and claims that this is proof that all Australians are Australian now. (I’m not familiar with the use of “ay” in North Queensland although I’m much more familiar with the Australian accent since Lindsay turned me on to the ABC.)

There is a 35 minute interview with Inga Clendinnen at the Australian Biography site. Very interesting.

The entire account of the Settlement at Port Jackson by Watkin Tench can be found here.

The first governor of the settlement was Arthur Philip. His account can be read here.

This first settlement is now modern day Sydney.

The Kite Runner (Riverhead Essential Editions)

by Khaled Hosseini

Finished The Kite Runner today written by Dr. Khaled Hosseini.

The story was well told, but I’m not sure I particulary enjoyed it. There was no satisfaction in finishing it. Perhaps this is because there were so many horrific things the characters had to deal with. But it also felt kind of formulaic somehow. A little flat, perhaps. I’m not quite sure. I had the feeling throughout the entire work that I was reading an engaging creative writing project rather than a well-developed novel. It was very interesting, and the book did a good job of presenting the Afghan culture. I’m grateful for this because I knew very little about Afghanistan before reading this book.

The title refers to a popular sport in Kabul. Kites are bought or made with glass coated strings capable of cutting the strings of other kites. The goal is to have the last kite flying. When the kite gets cut, there are runners who catch the loose kites. They are called kite runners.

The story is about two boys, Amir and Hassan. Amir is a Pashtun, and Hassan a Hazara. Pashtuns were considered to be the only legitimate Afghans until 1960 when other races were recognized as Afghan, too. Amir is a Sunni and Hassan a Shi’a, different religious sects within Islam. (More on differences in religion here; more on the Afghan people here.)

Hassan is Amir’s servant, although the two grow up like brothers. In the first few chapters of the book, Hassan is senselessly abused by a boy (Assef) who is part German-part Pashtun, and Amir watches on horrified, but does nothing to stop it. The story revolves around the redemption of this “knowing what is happening but looking the other way”. What happens to Hassan reflects what happens to Afghanistan. And the frequent reference to the sacrifice of the lamb seems to refer to Hassan and Afghanistan as well.

I won’t say anything further as I don’t want to give away the book which is worth reading if you want an enjoyable way to learn more about Afghanistan. Interesting story, too.

Hosseini says if he were to change one detail in the book, it would be having made Assef part German. It wasn’t his intent to perpetuate the myth of the German evil of Hitler or to insinuate that Afghans could not be evil all on their own. He chose the character based upon a bully from his childhood.

The descriptions of Afghan pre-Taliban are beautiful. The descriptions afterward, horrifying.

Luke Powell’s Photography Page has many beautiful pictures of Afghanistan pre-Taliban and post-Taliban.

Barnes & Noble Interview with Khaled Hosseini at Meet the Writers. (I like his favorite novels list.)

Books recommended on Taliban and Afghanistan by Hosseini:
Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul East of New York (great look into the old and the new Afghanistan written post 9/11)
George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (US role in the Afghan-Soviet war)
Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan (Unusual travel book)
Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan (English reporter who covered Afghanistan for years and is familiar with the personalities)
Ahmad Rashid, The Taliban (non-fiction)

Taboo - The Complete First Season (National Geographic)

by Morris Abraham

I’ve been watching the first season of the National Geographic series, Taboo over the past few months. Each 1 hour episode (13 of them in all) left me somewhat squeamish but all were interesting. Various traditions and practices around the world considered “normal” where they are practiced and “taboo” where they are not are presented with commentary offered by many anthropologists and experts on religion.

The first episode was interesting and exposed our taboos about drugs. Something I’d never really considered is that we in the west tend to use drugs to calm us down and to restrict our realities. But many people use drugs for the complete opposite reason - to expand consciousness and to move themselves beyond the restrictions of their perceived realities. Expanded consciousness is something that scares the west to death because it has very little to do with reason. We are fearful of drugs and so we control them.

The second episode was about healers: drinking your own urine and killing animals. The third episode was about food taboos. I really did not enjoy this episode. They showed a beloved pet dog being killed for a tribal ceremony; cobras being killed to give virility; and a man in Pismo Beach trying to get people turned on to eating bugs. My daughter and I both decided it might be a good idea to become vegetarians after this episode.

I thought I wouldn’t like the fourth episode, but I found it quite interesting. It’s on blood sports. Cock fighting, bull fighting, and even people fighting. The bull fighting was absolutely fascinating. In Spain and Mexico, it is always listed in the Art section of the newspaper, not the sport section. After watching this episode, I can understand why it is considered an art. It is a major discipline and follows along with many world myths. I personally can’t get into killing a bull for art, but the episode most definitely changed my mind about the barbarity of bull fighting and helped me see it in a different way. They claim the bulls die a much more valiant death than animals in the U.S. because they have the opportunity to kill what it is trying to kill it. And the animal is honored. They can’t understand how Americans would see the practice as barbaric since we are such avid meat eaters and our meat is killed in such huge quantities and in incredibly inhumane ways.

The fifth through eighth episodes were on Evil Spirits, Voodoo, Marriage and Witchcraft. Not sure why marriage was thrown in the middle of these topics, but it was quite interesting - an exploration of arranged marriages and marriage between same gendered individuals. Voodoo and Witchcraft have been so heavily demonized by colonialization in the areas where these rituals were practiced that the words themselves feel like taboo to those of us in the west. But both are making a come back and aren’t actually as “evil” as they sound although they are occasionally used for evil. But Christianity is often used for evil in the same way voodoo is whenever anyone prays to defeat an enemy, etc.

The ninth episode was about Sexuality which followed a transgendered individual to Thailand where she underwent a sex change. It also explored the attitudes toward gender in various areas of the world. Quite interesting. Not all cultures are as uptight about men being men and women being women as those of us in the west.

The tenth and eleventh episodes were on Death and Rites of Passage. Several rites of passages were explored along with an elderly American couple being admitted to a nursing home. This is a horrible taboo in most cultures outside of the west.

The twelth and thirteenth episodes were Tests of Faith and Tattoo. Firewalkers in St. Helen’s were interviewed. Very interesting.

Not sure I can recommend this to everyone. But I’m glad I watched it. I have a new understanding toward much of what I’ve considered to be taboo in the past.

Wonders of the African World

Just finished watching an excellent series from PBS called Wonders of the African World. We have a guest staying with us for the next few weeks and he is from South Africa so was able to offer a first-hand perspective on the last episode in the series.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard, hosts the six-hour series.

It begins in Nubia, home of the highly advanced ancient black kingdoms of the Nile that rivaled Egypt in 1970-1520 B.C. He takes us to see the temples at Jebel Barkal built in the 11th century, and Meroe in 4th B.C. to 325 B.C. The building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960’s forced 100,000 Nubians to relocate and it also buried 250 miles of Nubian history.

Then we are taken to the Swahili Coast and get to visit Zanzibar. The Swahili believe themselves to be of Arabian descent and some claim to not be of African descent at all. Slave trading occurred in this area and many of the Swahili were wealthy slave traders. (It wasn’t only the Europeans making a profit off of the sale of people!)

From the Swahili Coast, Gates takes us across africa into the West African slave trading centers - Ashanti and Dahomey. Gates great-great-great grandmother was a slave who was sold at Ashanti (Ghana). Gates says the trading center at Elmina is for African Americans what Auschwitz is for Jews. Very unsettling. Here again, black people were selling black people.

Next is Ethiopia, back on the East side of Africa, where we search for the Ark of the Covenant. Ethiopia is the only country claiming to have the Ark of the Covenant. Roderick Grierson, an expert on the covenant, believes there may be several arks of the covenent and perhaps Ethiopia has one of them. Of interest to Gates was also the thought that when he was growing up in West Virginia in the Methodist Church, all of the saints were white. In Ethiopia, the saints are black. Gates claimed that no where else in Africa was he mistaken so frequently as being African as in Ethiopia. There is no way for him to know what his ancestry is, but this recognition was exhilarating for him.

The next episode takes us back across Africa to West Africa and the road to Timbuktu and a trip down the Niger River. Falsehoods and theories about the barbarity of West Africans from European colonialism persisted up until the 1970’s. It was taught that these people were illiterate and incapable of living a civilized existence without the aid of other cultures. But this was a horrible falsehood. This view is changing as more and more scholars begin to dig into the riches of African culture, discovering an immense sophistication in places such as Jenne-Jeno. In Timbuktu, a great university existed with a library full of African writings from African scholars in the 16th century in the international university at Sankore Mosque, clearly disproving the “illiteracy” of earlier African people. As Gates says, if translated, these books might completely rewrite black history. The university was adversely affected by the Morroccan invasion in the 1590s and never regained it’s status. You can view a clip about these books here. And, if you are interested, there is a clip on modern day slavery here.

Last trip on the journey is into South African and Zimbabwe. This was quite fascinating because my friend was able to fill me in on personal details from having grown up in South Africa. He claims that what was taught about African history was akin to teaching that the Native Americans had no history in America. Students were taught that no African history existed at all prior to European colonialism and is only now, with the end of apartheid, being rediscovered. There are great structures in both Zimbabwe and South Africa that Europeans concluded were built by anyone but the Africans. But we now know that the ancient cities of Mapungubwe, Thulamela, and Great Zimbabwe, were sophisticated international trading economies and had remarkable architecture and were built by the Africans. (More on history as propoganda can be found here.)