Narrative Notebooks 2

Unexpected Dimensions!

Americans are still living in the Second World War worrying about Munich and ‘appeasement’ and states falling like dominos. They don’t realise that small countries like Iraq aren’t like Germany or the Soviet Union, but congress and the media buy into it! Also, this whole obsession with peace and having a ‘peace partner’ obscures the real problem which is the illegality of the occupation and brutality of the occupiers and their true objectives (land, water, religious sites, etc.) But we’ve bought into that too!

Needless to say, the Israelis encourage this. The whole ‘rogue state’ and state-sponsored terrorism nonsense the Americans are into goes back to the 1980s, following the Entebbe operation in Uganda, where Benjamin Netanyahu used the popularity of his martyred brother t launch anti-terrorism think tanks that said terrorism was pushed by ambitious Mideast states. You can find this in American cinema too.

Using an American actor to play him!

Needless to say again, we do very little to correct these stereotypes because we buy into these self-same narrative. The West, and the Arabs, also forget that the Jews were originally nomads to begin with, and were treated the same way they treat us by the civilised Cannittes!

Remember Zahi Hawas refusing to let Obama ride a camel, and getting an African looking tour guide!

Borat: [singing the Kazakhi national anthem to the tune of the American national anthem] Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls / Kazakhstan is number-one exporter of potassium / Other Central Asian countries have inferior potassium / Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world / All other countries is the home of the gays...

I grew up in Kuwait and they used to tell us at school that Kuwaiti oil is special and unique and that Kuwait is uniquely designed to use oil. They’re trying to squeeze asmuch significance as possible out…

… of as little as possible. They also told us tat the big historical event in Kuwait’s history was the battle of Qadisiya, which happened Iraq when there wasn’t anything called Kuwait to begin with. The word Kuwait comes from kuwt, which is a small village, and there’s one like it in Iraq! Even the word ‘Iraq’ is the name a rock the Arabs used to pass to go to Persia to trade while there are ‘iraqs’ in Egypt!

Historical uniqueness can be transported into the future too, where what you do now determines whether you will be remembered or not in the future. See how the future intersects with the present with the past! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, narratives go very actively into the construction of politics at the level of politicians creating popular perception at the level of their voters and the international community. (Even Pol Pot was into immortality!)

...

Hence, the creation-myths that go into the linear narrative of nationalism (the melodramatic, and morally unique, birth of a nation). The word nation, comes from a Latin word used for tribe but the root word in original usage is ‘birth’! In the case of the French revolution they started a new calendar where the first day after the revolution was day zero in human history!! Pol Pot did the same thing in Cambodia, and he was originally a Buddhist monk!!!

... the modern museum was unimaginable because the mediaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past andpresent.

--- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1996

Narrative become essential to colonialism, portraying history as the story of continuoys progress, with the West at the pennicle of it and everyone else behind. This came out in the form of museums in the colonies and at home, with Africans and native Americans exhibited with cavemen and China, India...

Benedict Anderson

... and Islam exhibited with the glorious but nonetheless out of date civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome. All were seen as living fossils that needed to be studied so the West could better make sense of its history, and from there figure out how to ‘fix’ these societies and make them like the West!

In this revealing episode of The Simpsons – ‘Lemon of Troy’ – you get the same thing, on a smaller scale for the town of Springfield.

Springfield was named after its noble founder, who set it up as a town where men wouldn’t marry their cousins, as if this is something unique of Springfield only in the whole of America!

Hence, ‘creation myths’. That covers the temporal dimension of nationalism. What about the spatial dimension, what makes you distinct and unique and better than everybody else, especially those most like you – your next door neighbours?

In a narrative, such as a novel or a film, motifs... are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the piece’s major themes. The narrative motif is the vehicle by means of which the narrative theme is conveyed.[1] The motif can be an idea, an object, a place or a statement.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(visual_arts)

The tree is a symbol – a visual motif in the national narrative – of what’s unique and special about them. There’s nothing special about the lemon tree in itself, but the fact that it was put there for a...

... special reason by a special person makes it special, hence the desire of the bad neighbours to take it from them!

Borat: He is my neighbor Nursultan Tuliagby. He is pain in my assholes. I get a window from a glass, he must get a window from a glass. I get a step, he must get a step. I get a clock radio, he cannot afford. Great success! Borat: This is my country of Kazakhstan. It locate between Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and assholes Uzbekistan. Borat: There lives Nursultan Tulyakbay. He's still asshole. I get iPod, he only get iPod Mini. Everybody know it for girls!

This nationalisation of someone else’s history happens frequently in history, and or good cognitive and narrative reasons (sociology and politics of knowledge). For instance, the paintings below are from the Shahnameh, depicting Alexander the Great building the wall that guarded against Yajuj and Majuj, and another of a Persian prince proving his innocence by walking through fire unhardmed!

Notice also the Persian imagery used for ‘Sekandar’ here. The audience is Persian too!!

Borat: My name i' Borat, I come a-from Kazakhstan. Can I say a-first, we support your War of Terror. [crowd cheers] Borat: May we show our support for our boys in Iraq. [crowd cheers] Borat: May U.S. and A kill every single terrorist. [crowd cheers] Borat: May George Bush a-drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child of Iraq. [crowd cheers wildly] Borat: May you destroy their country so that for the next thousand years not even a single lizard will survive in their desert. [some of crowd still cheers]