Representing the representers: Non-Western depictions of Orientalists and Orientalism in Turkish,Mexican,and Bengali writing

Abstract

How do writers from regions with a historical experience of colonialism depict Western Orientalists in their work? What exactly does it mean to “reverse the gaze” and include the Orientalist within the frame of representation? The article considers the non-Western representation of Orientalists and Orientalism in literary texts from three different regions (Turkey, Mexico, and Bengal), concentrating in particular on Oguz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected), Ignacio Padilla’s Antipodes, and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, but also referring to a wide selection of other texts in the process. It suggests three categories of such representation — parodic, empathetic, and authoritative, in ascending order of sympathy — and proposes, in the analysis of the various fictitious representations of Orientalists examined, a central link between Orientalism and the sacred. Finally, the question of the ironic representation of Orientalists — the extent to which a redemptive irony is adopted by structures of power as a tool of self-preservation — is also considered.

Jacques Casanova and Pierre Loti thought that they had seen the East because they drank coffee in the reception quarters of some Turkish palaces’ villas. But they never saw the real Orient [Asıl Şark görünmeyen].

Ömer Seyfettin, “The Secret Temple”/“Gizli Mâbed” (Seyfettin, 1988: 301)

Edward Said famously begins his foundational study of Orientalism with Marx’s observation on the semantic impotence of the downtrodden from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: that since the represented cannot represent themselves, they are at the mercy of the representer (Said, 1978: 1). For a non-Western writer, representing the Orientalist in their fiction might well be seen as a kind of resistance — a counter-representation, swerving the telescope around in the other direction, forcing the hegemonic eye to suddenly become finite, visible, even mockable. Ömer Seyfettin’s memorable story, written just after the First World War, is one such example: a Turk who invites an enraptured French tourist to his foster-mother’s dilapidated house for a glimpse of the “real Orient”. The tourist stumbles into the washing-room in the middle of the night and declares it to be an Oriental temple, full of sacred relics and holy water.

The question of “returning” or “reversing” the gaze — in essence, whether the oppressed/disempowered subject is able to turn the perspectival tables on their oppressor and re-configure them in their representations — lies historically at the heart of many debates on race, gender, and colonialism. The colonial, non-British representation of Britain, for example, by Muslim/South Asian writers, has been the focus of scholars such as Jagvinder Gill and Claire Chambers (Gill, 2010; Chambers, 2015). Britain’s legacy as a violent colonizer produced an influx of colonial subjects who would return the imperialist gaze and paint their own version of what they saw on the streets of London and Oxford. Most recently inflected in “whiteness studies” (puncturing the invisibility of the white subject), the idea of the returned or reversed gaze has worked as a fulcrum. Such a phenomenon can also be observed in both gender studies (the female subject reversing the power relations of hierarchy) and postcolonial studies (the indigenous subject challenging the reductive gaze of the ethnographer ¹ ). Despite the extensive literature on Said’s Orientalism, relatively little attention has been given to the representation of Orientalists themselves and the discipline of Orientalism itself in fiction — particularly by fiction writers whose countries are often the subject of the Orientalist regard. The rest of this essay deals with three representations of the practice of Orientalism from three different non-Western regions (Mexico, Turkey, and Bengal), regions chosen just as much for what they have in common as for their differences. All three regions have had some form of encounter with Western imperialism — even if this manifested itself in a somewhat different manner in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, where the Turkish War for Independence (Istiklal Savaşı) pursued somewhat different parameters than the independence struggles in Bengal against the British and in Mexico against the Spanish Crown (and later, of course, against both French and US power). All three regions have a single, dominant metropolis (Istanbul, Calcutta, and Mexico City), and nineteenth-century modernizing elites, generally an urban bourgeoisie who took it upon themselves to educate both an urban working-class and a rural proletariat. All three sets of elites brought with them their own religious versus secular tensions — whether it is a struggle between the laik and the ulema in Turkey, between an educated bhadralok and deeply Hindu consciousness in Bengal, or the kind of conservador and liberal tensions which gave rise to a priest-led insurrection like the Cristero War in Mexico. All three regions have had language issues at the very heart of their identity struggles — think of the Romanization of the Turkish script in the 1920s and the long history of discussions leading up to it, the late nineteenth-century debates in the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua over a central Spanish dictionary for Mexico and disagreements over whether such a dictionary should be monocentric/plurocentric, or the various debates in Bengali not just between practitioners of the upper-caste, more Sanskrit-based Shadhubhasha and the colloquial, everyday, more Perso-Arabic Cholitobasha, but also the early twentieth-century arguments around what constitutes vulgar and poetic language.

Stressing these commonalities should not lead us to overlook the differences between these three regions, of course. Of the three, only Turkey has difficulties producing something equivalent to either adivasis/tribals or pre-Columbian indigenous peoples (to call Kurds, Greeks, or Armenians “indigenous” overlooks Turkey’s substantially different history of people-settlement). Similarly, of the three, only Mexico has had no demographically substantive experience of Islam. Moreover, in contrast to Turkey and Bengal, only Mexican writers will sometimes feel a definite ethnic or cultural commitment to Europe as a continent left behind — a sense of belonging and origin unavailable to most Turkish and Bengali writers. Perhaps the starkest distinction lies within Bengal itself — the only region of the three never to have been a modern nation-state, and certainly the only one regularly to employ English on its home soil as an acceptable literary language.

Keeping both the differences and the commonalities in mind, this article asks a brief series of questions on the depiction of Orientalism and Orientalists within these local literatures: what kind of categories can these representations be said to fall into? What are the ontological consequences of representing such colonial figures and practices in one’s fiction — and exactly how political are these consequences? Does the appearance of a European monograph/archaeologist/philologist in a Mexican/Turkish/Bengali text have any ripple-effects for the secular, philosophical, literary, and even ideological underpinnings of that text?

Perhaps the first thing to say here is that the whole process of non-Western writers inserting European anthropologists and philologists into their own fiction hints at an intersubjective development of one’s own identity (or, as Meltem Ahıska succinctly puts it (2003: 365): “how the non-Western imagines that the West sees itself — is incorporated in the reflection on its own identity”). The constructive inclusion of oppositional difference as a means to self-augmentation — something which was always implicit in the Hegelian moment of sublation — potentially makes the representation of the Orientalist other in the fictive universe of the self a condition of advancement towards a more liberated sense of being. Representing the people who represent you doesn’t necessarily have to be some postmodern, metafictional device, leading the postcolonial writer into an ontologically bewildering hall of mirrors; it can also be the catalytic beginning of a journey towards an expanded, multiply-enriched self.

Not all non-Western depictions of European curiosity are as mocking (or as funny) as Seyfettin’s tourist. Non-Western literary representations of Orientalists, this article will argue, fall into three categories: parodic, empathetic, and authoritative. A more sustained example of Seyfettin’s parody of French curiosity, different in form but similar in spirit, takes place in the second part of Tutunamayanlar/The Disconnected by Oğuz Atay (1973), one of Turkey’s most influential modern novels. Turkey does not sit easily as a subject-literature within postcolonial conversations, if only because it operated for centuries as a colonial power itself, at its hegemonic height treating European nations as vassal states and, even in its declining century, perfectly capable of producing Orientalist discourses about its “backward” Arab subjects (Deringil, 2003). This is a fact which has prompted some scholars to point out the relative and convenient absence of the Ottoman Empire from Said’s groundbreaking book (Bryce, 2013). For all of the reasons just listed, however — particularly a pervasive sense of belatedness and civilizational “backwardness” or “inferiority” to the West (see Gürbilek, 2011), coupled with the imperialist place of the European powers leading up to 1923, which effectively turned Turkey’s Independence War into an anti-colonial struggle — Turkish texts share a number of postcolonial symptoms and anxieties with their South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American neighbours.

In many ways, Oğuz Atay (1934–1977) is the perfect expression of these symptoms. Any understanding of his magnum opus Tutunamayanlar requires a sense of the milieu in which it appeared: as Yıldız Ecevit points out, the conventions of the Turkish novel of this time were still largely realist (Ecevit, 2009: 236). Atay’s modernist/postmodernist novel, with its heavy Western influence on the one hand from Joyce and Kafka, and on the other from Hamlet and the Bible (see Irzık, 2003 and Parla, 2000), involved a near-complete break from Turkey’s literary past (which, as Ömer Madra (1984) has pointed out, is why it was almost completely ignored by his peers). The literary critic Berna Moran famously placed Atay alongside Yusuf Atılgan as examples of “resistance literature” (başkaldırı edebiyatı; Moran, 2008: 261), seeing in the novel an individual’s rejection of bourgeois mentality, and a constant feeling of disconnectedness (hence the title) which is highlighted not just through the protagonist’s feeling of alienation from his society, but also a broader sense of 1970s Turkey’s alienation from the “outside” world (‘outside” here meaning a “civilized”, progressive, democratic Western Europe). An ambivalent relationship to the West ensues, both admiring and critical. In Tutunamayanlar, Atay pursues a double-edged strategy of, on the one hand, appropriating the formalist innovations of the West (its literary modernisms, its various nihilisms), but at the same time using these to mock and parody both Turkish and Western culture. It is in this sense that the idea of “reversing the gaze” becomes particularly relevant to the literary aspirations of Tutunamayanlar, a text which represents both Turkish and Western cultures through a variety of different lenses.

Difficult to sum up in few words, Atay’s spiralling masterpiece brings together a dozen different registers of Turkish, drawn from an equal number of genres (poetry, ballads, drama, journalism) to narrate the posthumous tale of Selim Işik through the experiences of his grieving friend, Turgut. The sense of belatedness — Turgut is trying to come to terms with his best friend’s suicide — penetrates the book not only psychologically but also politically and thematically (one of the many fictitious articles in the book is entitled “Why do we not westernize? [Neden Batılılaşmıyoruz]”; 2014/1973: 146). In a book famed for its sceptical and speculative extravagance — imagining Jesus of Nazareth’s Turkish police file, or a dream sequence in which Hitler, Maxim Gorki, Selim, and the painter Osman Hamdi all discuss nationalist politics — one episode in particular takes aim at the act of Orientalism. In the exact middle of the first section, a long, 20-page poem by the deceased is presented, followed by a fictitious, 100-page commentary, written by a friend of Selim’s, Suleyman Kargı. Artifice and fictiveness are not merely employed as a device in these pages, but are revelled in. In “explaining” the poem, the fictitious commentator mimics a whole series of Orientalist, anthropological and philological manoeuvres — not least of all by referencing a number of completely fabricated titles:

Encyclopedia Israelica. (Atay, 2014/1973: 139)

Ibni Mahmut el Silâhi, Milletler ve Mizraklar Tarihi, Cilt VII, S. 967–69. (2014/1973: 139)

Abraham Talmud, Loves and Adventures of Secondary Biblical Heroes, New York, 1916. (2014/1973: 140)

Heinrich Roetke, Die Geist der Mesopatamien, Berlin, 1958. (2014/1973: 141)

The Ocean of Wisdom, trans. from Gok-Turkish by Alexander William Barnett, Oxford University Press. (2014/1973: 146)

Garip Yaratıklar Ansiklopedisinden. (2014/1973: 149)

Made-up names of German scholars such as Erich Freum and Otto Spender (inspired by Erich Fromm and Oswald Spengler) also abound. The barrage of fake academic referees and names buttress a stream of ludicrous pseudo-anthropological speculations on the origins and nature of the “central Asian peoples” — in the voice of a Western-trained anthropologist:

Before moving from their homeland in central Asia, Turks lived their lives as a collective whole […] [F]or this reason, however far their living standards may be from today’s, they did not have the following words which have been established in our language: glass, carpet, tie, rent … These words in their language (by which I mean pure Turkish) were completely unknown. These missing words […] lead us to the following conclusions about the everyday life of the tribe:

Turks did not look out of windows.

Turks did not sit on carpets or discuss their problems on them. This practice began with the Ottomans.

Turks did not wear ties.

Turks did not like levity.

Turks did not pay rent. Rent first began in the transition from primitive communism to a landed bourgeoisie. (Atay, 2014/1973: 138; my translation)

In these parodies, Atay is not merely attacking Orientalism, but also Kemalism; not just the foreign anthropologizing of the Turk, but also the local internalization of such beliefs; not just the people who write Oxford University Press monographs, but also those who translate them into Turkish. In this respect, the Kemalist state-sponsored collusion between Western Orientalist philology and nation-building is a key target here (for how Orientalist/essentializing ideas about Turks and Turkishness influenced Turkish nationalism, see Göknar, 2008). Atay’s modernist scepticism openly makes up ridiculous academic “authorities”, fabricating ludicrous histories and theories and pseudo-intellectualisms to make a mockery of the entire ideological machine of the nation-state. In this he differs from the nationalist Seyfettin and his French tourist, whose hallucinations are scientifically, positivistically exposed by the Turkish narrator. In Atay’s novel, philological fantasies are mocked and ridiculed — but with no cold, hard reality to offer as an alternative.

Having said that, both Seyfettin’s and Atay’s parodies of Orientalists — alongside texts from a Western background, such as Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode” — carry within them a humbling of divinity. Although the Orientalist was always understood as a rationalizing outsider to religion — the foreigner who scientifically dissolves and anthropologically explains the supersitious hocus-pocus of the native — these parodies of them denote a distinct hostility to religion. The ridiculing of the Orientalist has some proximity to the demythologizing of authority — reversing the process by which pronouncements and truth-claims become sacred by pitilessly and ludicrously replicating them in a risible fashion. If for Seyfettin and Atay this is respectively Western imperialism and Turkish nationalism, the net effect is the same — the exposure of a certain tendency to illusion and (self-)mythologization.

The critique of religiosity in these two Turkish texts, explicit or implicit, deserves to be underlined. Of course such a critique has a specific Turkish context: the secular nationalist Republic the Kemalists were constructing in the 1920s and 1930s relied on a reversal, and even a purging, of all things Ottoman. Perso-Arabic words and phrases such as mezarlık (cemetery) and inşallah (God willing) were being replaced with Turkic/Ural–Altaic words such as gömmüt and umarım; the characteristic Ottoman fez and the headscarf were being prohibited or strongly discouraged; and the Arabic script was removed, replaced with a Roman one. As many scholars have pointed out, the rapid secularization of Turkish society in these years — one might almost term it “de-Ottomanization” — was not so much a removal of religion as a subordination of it to the state (Davison, 2003: 341). In 1936, Erich Auerbach wrote to Walter Benjamin from Istanbul: “the process is going fantastically fast […] even Turkish texts texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible” (Anderson, 2008: 9). Although this was no Soviet eradication of religion (Şerif Mardin, most famously, has argued for a greater recognition of the continuity between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the transition into Kemalism) it remains fair to say that the Ottoman past and everything associated with it — not only architecturally, socially, and linguistically but also in terms of the minorities who lived under it — was comprehensively repressed in favour of a Turkic-origin secular national identity, and this institutional/mnemonic repression was to continue for the next six decades. The implication emerging from this, in the case of Tutunamayanlar, is a profound, and to some counterintuitive, relationship between Orientalism and religion. Atay’s fabrications of fake Orientalist scholarship are not merely parodies; they show the modern is no longer in the hands of the West. More importantly, if you can reproduce the idol yourself, then it no longer has any power over you (as the imaginary Portuguese colonizers created by Bruno Latour (2010: 3) tell the natives — no one believes an idol they have made with their own hands). Both Atay and Seyfettin’s decision to include the Orientalist within their fictive framework illustrates how they have stepped outside the universe of the Observed — not necessarily to take the place of the Great Observer (which would simply reverse the theology), but rather to show how the so-called “truths” produced by the Observer–Observed relationship were always ultimately fake anyway: fraud, if you will, underpinned by power.

Religiosity continues in our next category of representations. Empathetic portrayals of Orientalists offer an ambivalent response to the function, meaning, and consequence of the Orientalist themselves. They involve a critical appraisal of the practice, quick to recognize the finitude and flaws of the “expert”, but problematized (at least from a postcolonial perspective) by an unclear committment to the mythos of the Orientalist. This committment, invariably unconscious, might be moral, emotional, or political; what it produces is a representation which flirts with the mythology of the trope. Empathetic representations acknowledge and even ridicule the mythos surrounding the Orientalist, but at the same time accord a certain respect within this acknowledgment, even within this ridicule, for the inner history and validity of the trope. In terms of the previous category, we might say empathetic representations return the gaze in a discordant but not disruptive fashion.

The various Orientalists in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges spring foremost to mind for this sense of ambivalence — both his actual use of Orientalists such as Asin Palacios and Richard Burton, and also the delightful but mythologizing paen to the genius of Omar Khayyam’s translator, Edward Fitzgerald (“The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald”), which playfully suggests the nineteenth-century scholar to be the Victorian re-incarnation of the great Persian (Borges, 1973: 76–79). ² A more recent example would be Ignacio Padilla’s collection of short stories Las Antipodas y el Siglo/Antipodes (2001), a dozen texts set against the late nineteenth-century background of the British Empire in Africa and Asia. Each story has as its protagonist some kind of colonial professional whose carefully selected hamartia leads them down a path to self-abasement, ruin, and even death. More than anything, the critique of Empire here emerges in the depiction of a kind of colonial hubris, a self-blinding belief in the structure of “civilization” which prevents the protagonist (invariably a geographer, engineer, cartographer, or translator) from glimpsing the unthinkable difference of the culture he is negotiating, and the extent of his own very real limitations that are revealed in the process: a colonel’s inability to run a Rhodesian railway (“Rhodesian Express”), a well-intentioned official’s unfamiliarity with the depths of native trickery (“Darjeeling”), or an interpreter’s underestimation of the sophistication of local cruelty (“The Chinaman with the Heads”). The essential finitude of the Orientalist is stressed — their human foibles and weaknesses, their petty vices and physical limitations.

Padilla’s tales of Empire’s soldiers, translators, and engineers are interesting because the author’s Mexicanness gives him, in terms of perspective, a tertiary viewpoint with which to view British colonialism — one which is neither British nor African/Asian. In Antipodes, what we get the chance to witness is a politically uncommitted cosmopolitanism, articulated via an ironic romanticism. This results in images of Empire which are sometimes negative, and at other times quite favourable. Moving against any critique of the colonial in Antipodes are elements which provide a powerful and even reactionary counter-text: the masculine feel of the book, with its complete absence of female characters (López, 2012: 1190); the generic description of non-Europeans throughout nearly all the stories (in contrast to the psychological depth of the British protagonists); and, most importantly, a tacit admiration for the idiosyncrasy of the Orientalist himself (perhaps borrowed from Borges and Bowles — two of Padilla’s favourite writers ³ ), hinting at an ultimately forgiving view of Empire itself as the mere background to a stage for the admiration of British eccentricity (more on this Mexican Britannophilia in a moment). The eponymous story in the collection — “Las Antipodas y el siglo” — tells of a tribe of Kirghiz nomads who come across a dying Scottish geographer lost among the sand dunes and, thinking him to be a divine messenger speaking a sacred tongue, reconstruct the city of Edinburgh in the Gobi desert for him following his description:

[T]hat divine messenger bore the name of Donald Campbell. He was the most distinguished member of the Geographical Society and had arrived in China too late to join the legendary expedition of Younghusband. […] [O]ne fine afternoon, a tribe of Kirghiz nomads saved him from death, set his body astride a camel, and so led him to the beginning or the end of his unfortunate journey. […]

The Kirghiz […] gave themselves over with great passion to deciphering the delirious voice of the prophet the desert had brought them. With the help of those who knew something of the world and its peoples on the other side of the Great Wall, the Kirghiz managed to transcribe his words one by one. With great care, they transferred them to wooden tablets, and they pored over them like scholars. (Padilla, 2007: 5)

None of these 12 stories about British protagonists in their colonial settings, written in Spanish for a Spanish-language audience, contains the slightest reference to Mexico or Mexicans (indeed the closest is the short piece “Chronicle of the Second Plague”, set in the Amazon). The passage deserves a moment of wider context: Padilla belonged to a famous group of Mexican writers from the 1990s called the “Crack” generation, amongst whom were also Jorge Volpi and Eloy Urroz. Springing from a frustration with both the overbearing dominance of magical realism and a perceived pressure on many Mexican writers to approach the literary space as an expression of regional identity, writers such as Padilla and Volpi deliberately set their novels in European environments with little or no reference to their home countries (Padilla’s Amphytrion (1999) narrates a chess game taking place on a train through Central Europe during the First World War, while Volpi’s most famous novel, En Busca de Klingsor (1999), relates the developments in quantum physics at the end of the Second World War). In his own contribution to their manifesto, Padilla declared one of the aims of the Crack novel to be a reduction of their chronotope (from Bakhtin — the merging of novelistic time and space) to zero (Jaimes, 2007: 184). The stories in Antipodes don’t quite do this — Padilla has already said elsewhere that they constitute an “exception” to his trajectory as a writer (Padilla and Villagomez, 2007: 315). And yet, as thought experiments in the sense of ficciones, they do seem to play with the idea of settings as vehicles — backgrounds as mere devices to deliver a political/religious/philosophical point. Given the peripheral, non-Western setting of practically all the stories in Antipodes, this particular aspect of the Crack manifesto actually fuels a depoliticizing drive in many of the stories when it comes to Empire. One of the uncomfortably reactionary elements in “Antipodes” is precisely the way the “Kirghiz nomads” play out the role of unthinking, gullible collective to their delirious Scottish messiah. The act of rebuilding Edinburgh in the Gobi desert (itself an act of imperial fantasy at its finest – “natives” emulating European culture of their own free will, down to the very last detail) has a veil of irony drawn over it, for sure. Yet, even if the gesture is deliberately comedic, the process of mythologization is portrayed with the Kirghiz as the butt of the joke. For this reason alone, what is most interesting about a contemporary short story collection like Antipodes is that it appears to be an example of what one might term post-Orientalist Orientalism — producing Oriental tales of colonial adventure (wily Chinamen, stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen, grinning natives) akin to those of Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and Richard Burton, but written in the aftermath of a critical work like Said’s Orientalism — with the result that the same landscapes, characters, and situations are reproduced, but marked and stained with a cynical, finitizing hue of redemptive irony. The gritty heroism and resolve of an explorer or an interpreter is kept in diminished form, but modified by a series of less attractive qualities — greed, delusion, ineptitude. Somewhat in the spirit of Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “ironic disavowal”, a certain kind of liberal distance allows the ideology to repeat itself even in the very act of distancing and criticizing itself (Žižek, 1997: 26). The image of a group of central Asian nomads re-carving a replica of Edinburgh out of the sandstone of the Gobi desert may well be ludicrous, but the act of devotion still takes place — ludicrous or otherwise.

In discussing a Mexican text which represents Orientalists — a Mexican text, moreover, which strives to avoid any mention of Mexico or sense of Mexicanness — the question of the relationship between Latin American literature and the postcolonial arises. In what sense can Mexican writers be considered “postcolonial” writers? Certainly, as a non-Western country, Mexico shares some of the conditions of peripherality and belatedness that countries such as Turkey and India exhibit with regard to the West, and has similarly had its own anti-colonial struggles with the European powers. At the same time, this does not mean Mexican literature is not replete with a whole range of Oriental cliches and stereotypes — whether it is erotic short stories dedicated to the modern adaptation of Sheherazade (Rosa Beltràn’s tale of a sado-masochistic relationship, for example, “Sheri-Sade” (2009)), or more general novels such as Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro de Mexico (1977), which features a (often sexual) reference to the Orient every seven pages (penises “tattooed with souvenirs of Constantinople” (1977: 72), vaginas as “fragrant and tight as an explosion of African roses” (1977: 132), and so on). To some extent, the ambivalence of Padilla’s representations of British Orientalist (flawed, but admirable) finds its source (as with Borges) in a deeper ambivalence between Latin America and the postcolonial. A whole debate lies here around whether Said’s critique of Orientalism can be extended to Latin American writers. ⁴ Padilla, as a non-indigenous Mexican writer, enjoys an ambivalent relationship to the British colonialists he paints for us in Antipodes. The author stands both in proximity to the European imperialists he represents (as a non-indigenous writer of European origin himself), but also from a different angle in opposition to the colonialist West he writes about, coming from a country which has also had some historical experience at the receiving end of colonial power. The author’s decision, in almost every story from Antipodes, to adopt the viewpoint of the Western protagonist, does suggest Padilla’s gesture is not so much a reversal of the gaze as a refraction of it.

This ambivalence is perhaps best expressed in Antipodes in the word “natives” (indígena), which occurs four times in the short story collection. When Padilla writes this in “Rhodesia Express”, he is referring to the African workers who (in a scene reminiscent from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) are ordered to shovel in coal as quickly as possible to enable the Rhodesian railway engineer to run his trains on time — only to constantly disappoint the white Europeans waiting on the platform:

the trains left the Lusaka station on time and crossed the Zambezi at full speed, to arrive infallibly late at their destination. On various occasions Eyengton himself took the trip, in locomotives at full steam; and more than once he joined the native gangs shoveling coal into the congested boilers. And always, he was enraged to find on the platform in Salisbury a crowd of gloved gentlemen and ladies with parasols who, murmuring and giggling, waved their watches [in mockery]. (Padilla, 2007: 41)

What does it mean for a Mexican writer to use the word “natives” to describe African subjects under twentieth-century British rule? As far as reader empathy goes, it is not the African “natives” but the Welsh engineer, Eyengton, who has sworn to take his own life if he cannot make the Rhodesian Express run on time (and who ultimately fails because he is unable to overcome the mysterious lateness of the “native” climate) that is the central subject of the story, as with all of Padilla’s stories. Eyengton is informed of the futility of his struggle by an Irish soldier more familiar with the “native” climate (and described in the story as a “native”): “Colonel, the natives here a name for a strange affliction that seems only to affect settlers. They called it nkalo” (Padilla, 2007: 46, emphasis in original). Padilla here repeats a familiar trope from imperialist literature — readers of Kipling will recognize the perceived intellectual, cultural, and perhaps even racial proximity of the Irishman to the “native” — it is the Irishman in the story who, being closer to the “natives” by virtue of his own non-Englishness, is able to supply Eyengton with insider information. And yet we also have to wonder whether this Irishman is not Padilla himself — an interstitial observer of Empire, belonging to neither side and so able to perceive a situation the colonizer himself is blind to. In the stories of Antipodes, this mechanism is repeated again and again.

Unlike the parody, empathetic representations retain some sympathetic element of commitment to the humanitas of the Orientalist. This is a gesture of loyalty which, while still open-eyed and willing to see the project of Empire as a flawed and even malevolent apparatus, brings with it some of the East/West binaries that Orientalism relies on: savagery/civilization, collective/individual, animal/human, innocent/sophisticated. The full spectrum of these depictions culminate in our final category — authoritative representations.

Authoritative representations of Orientalists — amongst which could be counted texts such as Halide Edib Adıvar’s Turkey Faces West (1930), Fouad Ajami’s The Foreigner’s Gift (2006), and Nirad Chaudhuri’s Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Max Mueller (1994) ⁵ — are not necessarily wholly flattering representations of Western expertise, even if some of them do tend towards deification. As with empathetic representations, a lesser degree of critical or cynical and even satirical distance is sometimes kept (Chaudhuri spends four pages of his homage to the Sanskrit scholar Max Mueller, for example, dismissing a number of his scholarly positions — Chaudhuri, 1974: 274–275). What is crucial to them is that they replicate respectfully some portion of the Orientalist’s knowledge to build their own texts upon — invariably, transforming the replicated knowledge into the silent, invisible core of the text itself.

Amitav Ghosh’s 1992 blend of memoir and ethnography, In an Antique Land, is perhaps the most striking example of this last category. A personal account of Ghosh’s anthropology field work as an Oxford DPhil student in an Egyptian village, In an Antique Land (considered fiction by some critics, a category fiercely denied by Ghosh himself ⁶ ) is a work that crosses several disciplines and genres — autobiography, fiction/creative nonfiction, history, ethnography, popular anthropology, even archival study. Not only that, but it has also left in its wake a large amount of critical disagreement over the book’s representation of its Orient, and indeed its own relationship to the Orientalism it sometimes purports to critique. On the one hand, the book openly criticizes colonial administrators such as Lord Cromer (“by the light of Western knowledge and experience […] [we will decide what] we conscientiously think is best for the subject race”; qtd. in Ghosh, 1992: 91), Eurocentric views of Egypt, and Eurocentric concepts of history in general. This is not to mention the imperialism through which “the Europeans were bent on taking control of […] [the Indian Ocean] […] by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on these shores” (Ghosh, 1992: 288). Thus far, at least, it has been considered a postcolonial text. In its situating of an anthropologist as the narrative’s chief protagonist and its privileging of a medieval, multicultural past over a politically modern, monocultural present, some have found elements which compromise Ghosh’s anti-Eurocentric approach. To write about In an Antique Land, consequently, is to tread carefully between these two general sets of positions: one group of scholars (Chambers, 2006; Srivastava, 2001; Quayson, 2003) who see the book as radical, subversive, and wholly questioning the entire Western apparatus of Empire and History — and another (Majeed, 1995; Viswanathan, 1995; to a lesser degree Smith, 2007) who on the contrary see a text which, far from subverting any Western/Orientalist tradition, actually colludes with it on the profoundest of levels. ⁷

In an Antique Land is one of Ghosh’s most original books. There is something refreshing about its South-South approach — a modern Indian response to 1980s Egypt (or indeed its South-South-South approach — a Tunisian Jew who, via Egypt and Yemen, settles down in South India). Even if the Egyptian–Indian encounter is arguably mediated through a colonial interface — Ghosh’s Oxford anthropology project — the book does not content itself simply with a theoretical deconstruction of Eurocentrism, but performatively enacts a non-Western viewpoint through its circumvention of any obviously Western point of reference. Indeed, if Ghosh’s work has a single, over-arching merit, it is the way his novels either draw attention to little-known imperialist crimes (the British opium trade in India in A Sea of Poppies) or focus on “South-South” cultural relationships that completely exclude the West (not just an Indian’s experience in Egypt, for example, but also Bengal’s historical relationship to Southeast Asia — Ghosh, 2009).

In an Antique Land is a book, however, which delivers an ambiguous message about the twin disciplines of ethnography and history which are, in many ways, the focus of its gaze. Throughout one half of the book, a great deal of conversation can be found in the recorded interactions between Ghosh and the Egyptian villagers he chooses to live alongside and, over the years, subsequently re-visit. Sympathetic critics have cited this as an example of Ghosh allowing his anthropological subjects to undermine his own authority — indeed, to return his gaze, as it were (Chambers, 2006: 6; Smith, 2007: 449). It is certainly true that the moments of embarrassment and inarticulateness Ghosh records of himself in his various interactions with the villagers are foregrounded in the book; they form an almost dialectical counterpoint to the scholarly narration of his archival quest for the elusive medieval slave which forms the other half of the book. What sympathetic commentators overlook, however, is the extent to which these episodes are staged, performatively, as part of a public text. Without contradicting their veracity, it does mean their fictive re-enactment augments and enhances the authenticity of Ghosh’s claims (as Javed Majeed has also suggested — 1995: 52). When Ghosh records his subjects laughing and giggling at him, this is not so much “reversing the gaze” but rather an empowered imagining of what that “reversed gaze” might be — a gesture which comes across as being closer to insidious than subaltern. Critics who place too much stress on these “self-deconstructing” moments miss out what a performance the text of In an Antique Land actually is.

So what does In an Antique Land say about Orientalism and Orientalists? The answer brings us to the heart of the disagreement between the two clusters of views around the book. In an Antique Land is a book about a quest for knowledge: both the archival truth about the past, and the anthropological truth about the present. In this respect, however funny and human its cast of characters — Khamees, Nabeel, Shaikh Musa, and Jabir — they ultimately form a backdrop, at best an ancillary support, to the main purpose of the text: the acquisition of knowledge. In an Antique Land begins on the pages of a “Hebrew journal” Zion (1997/1992: 13), and ends in the glass cases of the Annenberg Institute in Philadelphia (1997/1992: 348). The true power and joy of Ghosh’s text lies in the past. The present — as a peripheral appendage — only fully comes into being when some kind of relationship emerges that links it to the past: either literally, when words from the Lataifa dialect Ghosh has learnt appear in the medieval North African Arabic script he is reading (1997/1992: 104–105), or more often metaphorically, when the harsh, intolerant politics of the present offer a sobering commentary on the lost world of “intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim” of the pre-modern (1997/1992: 339). Viswanathan has called this a romanticizing/homogenizing “nostalgia” (Viswanathan, 1995: 23). Even if this feels unfair, there are moments in In an Antique Land where a deeply aesthetic privileging of past over present does take place. We glimpse this process very early on in the book. The ancient Roman fortress outside Cairo called “Babylon” (“the name may have come from the Arabic Bâb il-on […] after the ancient sanctuary of the sun god of Heliopolis” (Ghosh, 1997/1992: 34)) is described as having become, today, a sewer-fed swamp:

a thick film of green slime shimmers within its soaring, vaulted interior […]. Incredible as it may seem, this putrefying pit marks the […] gateway that the Arab general “Amr ibn al-’Âs is thought to have effected his entry into Babylon in 641 AD. (1997/1992: 35)

From the landmark of ancient history and a site of the divine, we have descended to a “putrefying pit”. If the glorious gateway has become an urban sewer, it foreshadows the general ontology of In an Antique Land, which pursues a lost glimmer of purity (of tolerance, of wisdom, of a deeper humanity) through the shattered fragments of the fallen present.

Once the reader understands the pure/fallen dichotomy which underpins so much of Ghosh’s book, then the real function of the Orientalists we find in it becomes much clearer: that of preserving/recovering a lost spirit of humanity. One of Ghosh’s commentators, Neelam Srivastava, writes of the “humanism which forms one of the ethical underpinnings of In an Antique Land” (Srivastava, 2001: 60). This is certainly true — but it is a buried humanism, whose primary consequence is an Orientalism which is forever entrusted with the mission to preserve and recover this older spirit of mankind. In all fairness to the text, Ghosh often underlines the practices of power (invariably European) that enable scholars to legitimately ransack archives under the guise of “research”. With equal frequency, however, we see a subtle humanization, and at moments even beatification, of the Orientalist as an essential element in Ghosh’s own quest for a purer pre-modern self. Sometimes they are connected with the nobler names of European culture:

In 1752 or ’53, a Jewish traveller, Simon Van Geldern, an ancestor of the German poet Heinrich Heine, visited the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, in Babylon. (1997/1992: 81)

Sometimes their courage and intrepid character is underlined:

Jacob Saphir paid several visits to the Synagogue of Ben Ezra while passing through Egypt […] There was a snake curled up at the entrance, the officials of the synagogue told him, and it would be extremely dangerous to go in. Their refusal made Saphir all the more determined to investigate. (1997/1992: 83)

Sometimes it is their efficiency and inherent humanity:

The expert in Hebrew documents in Cambridge then was Dr Solomon Schechter, a scholar of great distinction and a forceful, charismatic man, who also happened to be blessed with a natural warmth of spirit and a great deal of charm […]

The Bodleian Library at Oxford also managed to acquire a large collection of Geniza manuscripts in these years, through the efforts of two members of staff who were quick to recognize their value. (1997/1992: 87)

Most importantly, a sense of gratitude is articulated to a set of professionals who, by methods fair and foul, are able to retrieve the Egyptian manuscripts and bring them “back” to where they belong — Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Philadelphia:

In 1898 the manuscripts that Schechter had brought back from Cairo were formally handed over to the University Library, where they have remained ever since, well-tended and cared for, grouped together as the Taylor-Schechter Collection. […] It is in this collection […] that the stories of Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave are preserved — tiny threads, woven into the borders of a gigantic tapestry. (1997/1992: 95; emphases mine)

In authoritative representations, the Orientalist is ontologically crucial to the text. Like the Western professors Halide Edib Adıvar cites in her defense of the Turkish nationalist narrative, or the calm sagacity of the US military officers in Iraq that Fouad Ajami presents in The Foreigner’s Gift (2006: 24–25), Ghosh’s Orientalists are philosophically as well as philologically central to In an Antique Land. Far from being merely the incidental subject of history, they are the weavers of the fabric of History itself. Ghosh’s reverence for them lies in this textual indebtedness — and the fact that he too, in his own Berkeleyan way, is recording and preserving the subjects of his gaze for posterity. When Ghosh writes how, in his Egyptian village, he felt he had “a right to be there, a sense of entitlement” (1997/1992: 19), this sense of sharing the recuperative mission of the Orientalist unconsciously forms at least part of the assertion.

Are we being too harsh on Ghosh here? No one is claiming that In an Antique Land is derailed by its benign portrayal of the Orientalist mission — only that a portion of the book’s textual success, indeed its critical efficacy, is problematically indebted to a branch of the apparatus it purports to denounce. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Orientalism sometimes dis-Orients — that is, that the use of knowledge obtained through imperialist power structures tries to contest the ideological framework of those power structures themselves. Ghosh’s emphasis on the humanity of the Orientalists he depicts (Schechter is “a man of considerable wit […] and pithiness” (1997/1992: 92), and “an otherwise kindly and humane man” (1997/1992: 93)) might reasonably be seen as an attempt to introduce nuance into a critical history of the machine of Empire. But it is the deeper premise of In an Antique Land: that foreign expertise, past and present, is necessary to locate and resurrect what Ghosh feels to be the purer, more tolerant pre-modern world that existed prior to the oppressive age of the nation-state. It is this premise which fundamentally respects and maintains the authority of the Orientalist, and in this respect diminishes the postcolonial credentials of Ghosh’s valuable book.

The word “authority” occurs over 90 times in Said’s Orientalism. So important is the term, Said uses it in the very opening pages as a definition of Orientalism itself: “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978: 3). Of all the writers discussed in this article, it is unsurprising that all of the texts belonging to the “authoritative” category of representations (Adıvar, 1930; Ajami, 2006; Chaudhuri, 1994; Ghosh, 1992) are English-language texts; which does not mean that fiercely anti-colonial texts are not often written in the language of the colonizer — both Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart spring to mind as powerful French/English confrontations with Empire. More cautiously, we might suggest there is something about the linguistic commitment to a tradition that can initiate, perhaps unconsciously, a whole series of sympathies, harmonies, and unwitting proclivities. “Reversing the gaze” in the language of the gazer never quite works — in adopting the same language, or optic, or form as the oppressor, there is always some act of ontological complicity which might nullify what is truly contrarian in the returned gaze; something which will always attempt the removal of what Foucault (1987: 7) once called “the thought from outside”.

For this reason, authoritative representations of Orientalism — unlike the other two categories of parodic and empathetic — are least likely to participate in the process of intersubjectivity briefly mentioned at the beginning of this essay. If the growth of the subject begins with a blocking and a moment of rupture, then any representation which feeds that continuity (instead of disrupting it), regardless of what language it is written in, remains tied to a trajectory which cannot leave that source as its point of departure. At the end of Things Fall Apart, even in the act of death and defeat for the protagonist, the title of the book the District Commissioner plans to write — The Pacification of the Tribes of the Lower Niger — expresses in the sublimest fashion all of the contempt Achebe holds for the colonial authorities he depicts. There is neither any recognition of authority in the “expertise” of the proposed book, nor the remotest trace of empathy with its cultural provenance. The confident ridiculousness of the title not only mocks the colonial self-delusion of its power, but also lends an element of pathos and hollowness to the “victory” it has won.

When non-Western writers insert a Western Orientalist into their fiction, a disruptive moment takes place: they have decided to represent “representation” itself. By bringing into their text a fabricated Orientalist title, or a slightly ridiculous anthropologist, or a humane professor in search of a text, the Western gaze is finally brought out from behind the curtain and rendered finite, visible. If this really is a disruptive moment (either, as Derrida says, a “tremble” ( 1987: 91), or something more foundationally unsettling) then the categories we have discussed indicate the range of that disruption: from the startling reversal or refraction of an oppressive gaze to its more subdued, less threatening repetition. In this analysis of what Afua Hirsch has called “reverse anthropology” (Hirsch, 2019), however, perhaps the limitations of the gesture — in a Zeitgeist as saturated with irony as ours — should not be overlooked, especially when it is deftly staged by the empowered party as evidence of the West’s capacity for self-reflection.

At the time of writing, a British television company is making a reality TV series entitled “The British Tribe Next Door”. A British family will be flown out to the Himba tribe in Namibia and will live in a purpose-built replica of their suburban British house (complete with frozen meals, British WiFi, and British television) for one month next to a settlement of Namibian nomadic tribespeople. The series will be broadcast in the UK next year. However epistemologically levelling the gesture might be — “we’re a tribe just like you, we have our rituals and practices, just like you” — the premises of the experiment remain disturbingly imperialist, and not simply because their primary goal is entertainment. Any representation which claims to relativize, finitize, and even demythologize the West, but fails to address the power relations and economic imbalance between both parties, runs the risk of being distracted by semantics from the material reality of the relationship. Recovering “agency”, to resurrect a quarrel from an old postcolonial debate, has little value if the “agency” recovered is confined purely to the realms of the text (Walder, 1998: 7).