I usually baulk at the idea of banning books, but I do find myself in favour of the CRE’s suggestion that Borders bookstores ban Tintin in the Congo.
Now I do consider myself something of a Tintin expert. A few years ago I was even an avid contributor and fact checker on the Cult of Tintin website, now defunct, but partially resurrected at Tintinologist.org. I’ve read Tintin in the Congo, and it is indeed appalling. In addition to the obvious racism, it is also distinctly environmentally unfriendly. Tintin blows up a rhino with a stick of dynamite, shoots an entire herd of impala by accident, makes a snake gobble its own tail, performs a summary execution of a chimpanze, attempts to shoot a crocodile in the face, and poaches an elephant for its tusks.
Where to begin with the racism in the book? Throughout, the Africans are portrayed as simpletons, who idolise Tintin and Snowy and fetishize anything western they can get their hands on. The chief of one tribe has a rolling pin for a sceptre.
The book’s only redeeming feature, and the only possible argument for it being on my shelf, is that it clearly demonstrates the change and improvement that Herge and Tintin underwent in the years following its publication. Congo is a meandering, incoherent story, where the latter books have carefully plotted story arc. Congo is dull and flat, where the latter books are rich and detailed. Congo is a stereotype, whereas the latter books were carefully researched, with artists from Herge’s studio sent all over the world to make sketches that could serve as a primary source. And the character of Tintin himself morphs from a patronising colonialist in Tintin in the Congo, to a character with much more empathy later on. In the early books he is an agent of governments. By the later books, he is a revolutionary, a subversive. In the early books, he desecrates tombs and customs with impunity, whereas the later books warn against such disrespect for other cultures.
Continue reading “Notes on Tintin in the Congo”
The Palace at Whitehall
From the rich and rewarding Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson:
The Palace must have been a single building at some point, but no-one knew which bit had been put up first; anyway, other buildings had been scabbed onto that first one as fast as stones and mortar could be ferried in, and galleries strung like clothes lines between wings of it that were deemed too far apart; this created courtyards that were, in time, subdivided, and encroached upon by new additions, and filled in. Then the builders turned their ingenuity to bricking up old openings, and chipping out new ones, then bricking up the new ones and re-opening the old, or making new ones yet. In any event, every closet, hall, and room was claimed by one nest or sect of courtiers, just as every snatch of Germany had its own Baron.
I suspect we have all encountered buildings like this at some point. Perhaps not as extensive as Whitehall, but still with that organic quality that tells us that the building has had more than one author. Another form of labyrinth, I suppose.
Quicksilver is packed with descriptions to the growing, evolving London of the seventeenth century. A city built around the river, for the barrow not the motor-car. How different to the meticulously planned New Towns of the United Kingdom, where soulless, empty roundabouts (with their obligatory crop of daffodils) take the place of the thriving ‘gates’ into the heart of the city.
Girl, Interrupted
Glance down my blogroll, and you will find Girl With a One Track Mind, the diary of a sex fiend. Abby, or ‘The Girl’ as she calls herself, has just published her memoirs, putting the highlights of her two years online onto the printed page.
The diaries are often funny and usually titillating. However, there also exists in Abby’s writings a confident feminism and a highly moral outlook. Some of the best posts, which inspire the greatest reader response, are those which deal with overcoming harassment, and fighting against the sexism of the film industry. Being a nyphomaniac does not mean the same as ‘loose morals’ and ‘The Girl’ is actually very particular about who she chooses to take on her adventures. Honesty and full disclosure are her watchwords. Her diaries are fantastic guidance for anyone who wants to be true to themselves and their desires, while still respecting oneself and other people…
The diaries work so well in online form because they are anonymous – Abby is obviously not her real name. If ‘The Girl’ were to interact with people who knew about her writings, the entire nature of the relationships she experiences would change beyond all recognition. Her comments on hitherto anonymous lovers would become unethical and impossible, since a fairly wide circle of people would know who they were. Anonymity is crucial, and the blog cannot work in any other way. This fact is obvious to anyone who has ever read the blog, and will be apparent to anyone who buys the book.
No so obvious, however, to the idiots at the Sunday Times, who have ‘outed’ Abby, publishing her real name over the weekend – (a journalist tracked her down via her publishers). The result, claims ‘The Girl’ on her blog, is that she has had to confess her lifestyle and blog to members of her family. She will now find a whole new kind of prejudice within the film production community, if indeed she gets any further employment at all from this sector. The blog posts may well dry up as a result. Finding a boyfriend will be a nightmare. And all for a poxy, soulless, off-the-front page expose in a Sunday newspaper, by a stupid journalist, Anna Mikhailova, who has missed the entire point of The Girl’s output. The real identity of ‘The Girl’ was never important. Shame on you Anna – for spoling our fun, and quite possibly the life of a decent, talented person. You have done no good.
Science fiction and nuclear weapons
Reading George Monbiot’s suggestion that nuclear proliferation is a self vindicating policy reminded me of the science fiction writings of Phillip K Dick and others. Specifically, stories where the effect precedes its cause, due to some paradox of time-travel or other. Going back in time to kill yourself, or become your own father, or both, that sort of thing.
In the world of global powerplays, the idea of deterrance and pre-emption means that cause can come after the effect – no time-machine or supernova required:
In nuclear politics, every action is justified by the response it provokes … Israel, citing the threat from Iran, insists on retaining its nuclear missiles. Threatened by them (and prompted, among other reasons, by his anti-semitism), the Iranian president says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, and appears to be developing a means of doing so. Israel sees his response as vindicating its nuclear programme. It threatens an air strike, which grants retrospective validity to Ahmadinejad’s designs. And so it goes on. Everyone turns out to be right in the end.
Since, the absence of a time-machine, we cannot return to the beginning of the last century and arrange for nuclear weapons to be uninvented, we fear an escalation. as each side (including the UK) maintains and improves their nuclear arsenal for the next fifty years at least. Negotiating not only non-proliferation, let alone disarmament, seems in itself the stuff of utopian fiction.
Perhaps we should look to another great science fiction story for the answers. In Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the epynonymous hero employs a series of bizarre and often counter-intuitive thinking to win the war games he plays. Perhaps a sudden and unsuspected move could solve the problem. Several people, including a correspndent in Time, suggests that Western nations build Iran enough solar panels to satisfy their energy needs. Alternatively, we could simply disarm unilaterally and without reason, thus confounding the opponent. After all, as Joseph Heller’s Closing Time teaches us, you don’t actually need any weapons to act as a deterrent, you just need to market them properly. Milo’s ‘Ssh’ aircraft can fly silently and bomb targets yesterday (more time-travel, presumably).
Having said that, Joseph Heller’s novels are hardly set in a world of tranquility and sanity, and another of Ender’s teactics is to lauch pre-emptive counter attacks with an all out, willfully destructive force.
Here’s another thought, however: If nuclear arsenals are deterrents, but nevertheless some president does actually lauch a nuclear attack on another country… what exactly would be the point of nuclear retaliation? The destroyed cities would still be beyond repair even after a counter-attack, the only difference being that there would be twice as many of them, and twice as many dead civilians, as after the ‘first-strike’. Humans consider vengenace to be an integral part of justice, but if it means that the aggreate population of the human race is diminished by two million people instead of one million, retaliation seems an inherently useless response.
The best way to prevent a nuclear war would be to ensure that the people who would use the weapons are not in power in the first place. The chain of events that brought Ahmedinejad to power are only now becoming clear. If we wanted a different situation in the Middle-East, we should have acted ten, twenty or thirty years ago. Look’s like we need that time-machine again….
Waiting for the Barbarians
My friend and colleague Sharif Hamadeh has just posted an essay on Waiting for the Barbarians at OpenDemocracy. Its one of my favourite books, a stunning examination of our fear of the ‘other’.
Update: Guy Keleny’s ‘Errors and Omissions’ column in The Independent compliments Hamadeh’s article.
The assumption behind the word [barbarian] … is that people who live in cities, pay taxes and obey written laws are superior to the more disorderly and robust denizens of wilder regions.
You may argue that this is so, but is it really fair to regard it as axiomatic, and to imbed in our language an insult to human societies with many admirable features? When people talk about ‘barbaric crimes’, I wonder what would be the reaction of an honourable barbarian such as Vercingetorix, Boudicca or Sitting Bull to the unspeakable crimes comitted by civilised peoples in the 20th century.
I had best find use another word to describe fox hunting.