Relatively Responsible!

Task: Compare and contrast Colin Rowbotham's Relative Sadness and Peter Appleton's Responsibility, paying close attention to form and content.

From: http://www.cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/6128

Critical Commentary

“Relative Sadness” by Colin Rowbotham and “The Responsibility” by Peter Appleton

By

Matilde My Kristensen

“Relative Sadness” by Colin Rowbotham and “The Responsibility” by Peter Appleton are both poems written after the end of the Second World War and convey a strong anti-war attitude through the accusatory and sensationalist content, and various literary devices. Their format, style, and choice of literary devices contrast greatly. This is to say that they ultimately produce different effects on the reader. While they both condemn the war and the violence it entails, the messages communicated by the poems have differing nuances: Whereas “Relative Sadness” highlights the irony in the grief felt by those who participated in starting, waging or exacerbating the war, “The Responsibility” reveals the irony in the casting of blames on those very people. Thus, the two poems – having different meanings, using different literary devices and producing different effects on the reader – are both just as effective in expressing a clear anti-war sentiment.

Alter Your Attitude!

Task: Write a commentary on Margaret Atwood's 'Attitude'.

Alter Your Attitude!

by 
Matilde My Kristensen

In all countries, graduation from one academic level to the next is a celebrated event, and in North America, the much-awaited delivery of a so-called “commencement address” takes place on the day of the graduation ceremony. A commencement speech serves the purpose of highlighting the importance of the high school diploma or university degree, especially in the context of the futures of the eager and motivated students around whom the festivities are centered. In June 1983, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood gave a commencement address to the class graduated from Victoria College, which was Atwood's very own alma mater. Generally, commencement addresses represent the last official message to a class, and consequently, the content of that message is of great significance. 

It can be argued that they ought to have an optimistic tone, incite motivation in the spectators, and hold a positive outlook on life: Margaret Atwood's rendition did all but follow that convention. Perhaps Atwood merely wanted her speech to stand out in a sea of speeches by some of the world's greatest men and women. Or, perhaps, she should dedicate her full attention to the writing of fiction novels, and spare us of her innermost woes and her hidden agenda. Indeed, with the exception of one paragraph out of the fourteen, Atwood's commencement address is a classic lament about the miserable state of the world, spoken in a tone of arrogance and moral superiority, and peppered with elements of accusatory and sanctimonious self-importance. Rather than motivating graduates to “be the change they want to see in the world” (Mahatma Gandhi) or to “Stay hungry, stay foolish” (Steve Jobs, in a Stanford University commencement address), Margaret Atwood effectively manages to deliver a speech that is largely off-topic, discombobulated and meaningless, while simultaneously exposing her closet-arrogance (and closet-sexism) and bitterness.

Atwood's arrogance is the predominant tone throughout the entire speech. At the beginning of the commencement speech, Atwood engages in a ramble of false modesty by downplaying her own intelligence, referring to her pre-university mind as “callow and ignorant” and her post-university one as “dubious”. She informs the audience of her “many overdue term papers”, her awful handwriting and her “interesting” essays, hoping somehow to convey her past rebelliousness, which, happily, she was able to overcome to ultimately become an award-winning writer, and her inherent brilliance which was impressive enough to cancel out her academic shortcomings and failings. Giving Atwood the benefit of the doubt and accepting these questionable comments as mere self-irony would quickly backfire, as the rest of the speech is saturated with hubristic assertions and predictions of the future from Atwood's part – it is beyond clear that the latter considers her own worldview to be factual, obvious and universally accepted, and leaves no room for alternate opinions or discussion. This complete imposition on her audience of her own ideas is manifested in her certainty of the fate of the world: “They will” embark on a study of this, future research “will prove me right”, and “we will soon have a state of affairs” in which, basically, everything and everyone is miserable, and human beings (herself presumably excepted) are either too lazy or too spoiled to do anything about it. In her concluding paragraphs, her last words consist of what is essentially a criticism of the human species, implying its failure, its fall from grace, its and moral degeneracy. Atwood states, “we can die with the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the death of the world was a man-made and therefore preventable event, and that the failure to prevent it was a failure of human will”, hereby discrediting the efforts, not only of the many experts studying and generating solutions to halt climate change, but of the entire institution of higher education, whose chief purpose is, surely, to educate the people who will contribute to the bettering of the world. Margaret Atwood is saying, in effect, that any occupation or pastime that is not concerned with the preservation of the rainforest or obsessive-compulsive tree-hugging, is unworthy of any praise or merit. Not only does Atwood criticize the actions of the people, she also vilifies the people themselves, in ironically mocking their response to a fatal natural disaster, claiming that they would draw from such an event a form of “satisfaction”. 

At the very end, Atwood minimizes the problems and concerns of inhabitants of the Western developed world, saying that “Things are in fact a lot worse elsewhere, where expectations center not on cars and houses and jobs but on the next elusive meal.” I suppose, then, that Atwood dismisses equally Western problems such as domestic violence, child abuse, drugs and socio-economic inequalities, because God forbid we waste our time and efforts on solving those when there are people starving in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, Margaret Atwood seems to be faced – along with many other people – in a false dilemma: the existence of problems perhaps more urgently in need of solving, does not nullify the existence or importance of problems in the lives of the very people she is addressing. Both sets of problems should be addressed. Once again, Atwood attempts to toy with the moral compass and social conscience of her audience, completely invalidating their opinions and problems, and in doing so, demonstrates her holier-than-thou demeanor.

Beyond the uncomfortable ring of condescendence, Margaret Atwood's speech is irrelevant in its content. Atwood's structure of choice seems to be that of a verbalized stream of consciousness: She begins her paragraphs with “'What shall I tell them!' I thought”, “Then I thought”, “Or maybe, I thought”, and “But I then thought”, the intended effect being to capture and preserve the attention of the audience and pull them into her mind (of course, it has been established by now that Ms Margaret Atwood's mind is the place to be). The trouble with Atwood's stream of consciousness is that it makes no sense and has no meaning to anyone but herself. Nothing fruitful emanates from the dissemination of her thoughts and experiences, as they are utterly irrelevant to the event in question, that is, the joyful event that is the transition of students from the world of higher education to the professional world. She begins by telling us about her recent sea-sickness and (presumably) her experience of menopause; then, about how the four years her audience has spent in blood, sweat and tears have served them nothing – no, instead, the boys should pick up a copy of Forbes or The Economist in order to “improve their place in the power hierarchy”, and the girls should accept the cooking and cleaning tips provided by Homemakers Magazine. Atwood goes on to deliver a paragraph about the fact that she was taught that a proper meal “should consist of a brown thing, a white thing, a yellow thing and a green thing”; she speaks at length about the correlation between sturdy wrists in writers and their success, followed by the realization that, maybe, she shouldn't actually speak about creative writing and literature after all. The last paragraph in Atwood's stream of consciousness continues in much the same directionless fashion, providing the audience with irrelevant factoids and personal anecdotes, namely zinc imbalance-related post-partum hair loss. Needless to say, the topics Atwood covers hardly inspire young idealists, nor do they encourage their optimism and can-do attitude. A different manifestation of the irrelevance of the content of the speech lies in Atwood's “examples” to illustrate that “you always have a choice”. Rather than ending her speech on a positive note, she seems to be pushing her own agenda, which she parenthetically confirms herself when she “brings us to the hidden agenda of this speech”. Indeed, more than being a novelist, Margaret Atwood is a fervent environmental activist, and that is obvious in her commencement address: the final three paragraphs are essentially dedicated to an exhibition of “the catastrophe that threatens us as a species”, an exhibition which is accompanied by an accusation of man as the perpetrator in “the death of the world”. 

Margaret Atwood raised important points in her commencement speech to the graduating class of Victoria College in 1983. The loom of climate change and natural disasters still ring true today, and it is a well-known reality that a university degree does less than it may claim to help us survive the trials and tribulations of life. However, there is a moment for everything, and Atwood chose the wrong moment to preach her cause and to patronize her audience. Commencement speeches exist to motivate students to be active and dynamic in embarking on their careers – not to make them feel guilty about taking one too many showers or about wishing they might own two cars one day. Commencement speeches serve to project the students into the future, perhaps demystifying it ever so slightly, if only briefly and superficially – not familiarize the audience with Margaret Atwood's cold sweats and issues with hair loss. Moreover, the overarching tone of self-sufficiency only provokes annoyance in the spectators and readers of the speech. Truly, the only valuable piece of advice lies in the last sentence of the speech: “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it.” Alter your attitude, Atwood. 

The Portrayal of Women as An Indicator of Imperialistic Ideology

The Portrayal of Women as An Indicator of Imperialistic Ideology

in Graham Greene's The Quiet American

by

Matilde My Kristensen

The Quiet American by Graham Greene is a novel set in the Indochina of the early fifties, during the period of the French war in Vietnam. The novel is widely considered to be autobiographical, as it is based on Greene's experience as a news correspondent in Vietnam during the war. The themes of colonization, imperialism and orientalism inevitably pervade the novel, as we are given a first-hand account of life as a foreigner in a strange country, as a Westerner in a Far-East world, and as a colonizer-by-proxy on a colonized territory. Though Fowler, the protagonist of the novel, is supposed to be ideologically neutral and objective in his perspective, it clearly transpires that his mind is just like that of a colonizer's, manifested in his egocentrism, his superiority complex relative to the locals, and perhaps most notably, in his treatment of and attitude towards women. In fact, several perceivably powerful men characterized in the novel have rather questionable views on the females in their entourage and in general. This, in my opinion, directly mirrors the way in which the allegedly universally inferior native populations were treated during the colonial era, up until the end of the wars of independence, and still are, to a certain extent, today. The treatment of women in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, is thus indicative of, and serves as a metaphor for the overarching imperialistic mindset of the main characters in the novel. 

In the first five chapters, it quickly becomes evident that Phuong, the Vietnamese fiancée of the American Pyle and the ex-lover of the English Fowler, has no control over her own love life and future.

Until she meets Pyle, she is with Fowler, who sees her as nothing more than something to take pleasure in – there is no alternative for her, as marrying a European man was held in high esteem in the context of imperialism. One evening, while still in a relationship with Fowler, Phuong meets Pyle, who falls in love with her. At their first meeting, Phuong's sister Hei interrogates Pyle on his life and his person, and proceeds to advertise her sister, almost as if she were an object up for auction, by telling Pyle that “She is delicate. She needs care. She deserves care. She is very, very loyal”. It already here becomes clear that Phuong has little control over her own love life. After the encounter, it becomes clear that Pyle has an undeniable advantage over Fowler, as he is rich, handsome, and most importantly, he is young. Phuong and Pyle form a couple, until, that is, Phuong is informed that Pyle has been found dead. Instead of crying and feeling the grief of losing a loved one, however, Phuong remains expressionless: “There was no scene, no tears, just thought – the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.” Phuong's reaction and Fowler's description of it suggests that they both know that there was no emotional bond between Phuong and Pyle; that Pyle was merely a tool for Phuong, whose only fate, as the “most beautiful girl in Saigon”, was to marry a wealthy European man – yet another example of Phuong's powerlessness when it comes to her love life, and her life in general. 

This powerlessness experienced by Phuong, manifested in her sister's attempt to marry her off and in the fact that her engagement to Pyle was just a formality, and not a result of love, mirrors the powerlessness of the colonized world. Just like Phuong believes that she needs the companionship of a European or Western man, so too did entire nations, to some extent, believe that they needed the colonizers. It can be argued, however, that Phuong doesn't truly believe she needs a wealthy white man, and that the colonized nations didn't believe either that they needed an imperial presence to function: if this is the case, given that Phuong does not object to her situation and her role in the lives of Pyle and Fowler, an entire new layer of imperial stereotypification is uncovered. If Phuong really is unsatisfied with her treatment, yet says nothing, the book effectively manages to perpetuate the stereotype that Asian women are docile and subservient. 

Indeed, the women in The Quiet American are portrayed rather like docile, subservient and exotic maids. This portrayal parallels the way in which entire colonized nations were made exotic by the imperial powers during the colonial era, reducing them to being referred to as the “other”. The way in which Greene renders the women in the novel, Phuong in particular, an “other”, is in part by objectifying them through the character of Fowler. In the very first chapter, Fowler describes Phuong as “the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest” and “indigenous like a herb”. The last description especially, echoes the portrayal of the native colonized peoples and lands: indigenous. The colonized were made to feel like inferior “others” who needed to be civilized and educated by the Europeans, and were even referred to as “the White man's burden”. Also in chapter one, Fowler's interior monologue has him thinking, “She must have loved him in her own way”, in which it becomes obvious that Fowler sees Phuong as different, as not possibly being able to love like he does, or like a European might – to him, her love is different, her feelings are not as worthy as those of Westerners. He is thereby making her an “other”, revealing his imperialistic attitude.

While there is an important element of objectification in the way that the women in the novel are treated, the fact that the women are portrayed in such a way that they appear to be fragile, defenseless and vulnerable can also be interpreted to being a feminization of the women. A practically universal social norm states that while the males of society are supposed to be imposing and physically strong, women are supposed to be gentle and rather innocent. This excessive feminization of the female characters in The Quiet American is a metaphor for the feminization of Vietnam itself. In the same way that women are fragile and inferior to men, so is Vietnam inferior to the English, the Americans and the French, and so is the colonized world inferior to the imperial empire. 

There is a last, obvious parallel between the treatment of women and the treatment of the colonized nations: the exploitation they underwent, and undergo. In the first chapter of The Quiet American, Fowler tells us, “I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.” In this passage, Fowler does not once describe Phuong's character of personality. He only describes her in terms of services she can provide, of things she can do for him. Moreover, in the same scene, Phuong prepares an opium pipe for Fowler. This image is doubly significant, since not only do we see Phuong servicing the Englishman by heating the opium and preparing his pipe, but it makes an allusion to the poppy fields of Indochina, in which locals slaved days upon end to procure opium for their colonizers. Here, Phuong undoubtedly symbolizes her whole nation, and perhaps even the entire colonized world, by way of her exploitation by a European man.

When Fowler is finished smoking his pipe, he narrates to the reader his feelings about Phuong at that moment: first, he deliberates on whether or not she would want to have sexual intercourse with him, whereafter he asserts that after four pipes, “I would no longer want her”. “It would be agreeable to feel her thigh beside me in the bed”, yet “her presence of absence mattered very little”. This extract from Fowler's interior monologue perfectly showcases how Fowler uses Phuong as an object, and only for his own enjoyment and comfort – she is exploited.

Another part of the novel, the beginning of chapter three, presents the reader with a new form of exploitation: the prostitutes in the House of Five Hundred Girls. Prostitution is unquestionably the most widely practiced form of exploitation, even when it is remunerated. Fowler meets Pyle and Granger in the brothel, standing among the hundreds of Vietnamese girls willing to sell themselves to these European men in exchange for money. Once again, the exploitation by the white Europeans and Americans of the “indigenous” Vietnamese, is symbolic of the large-scale, widespread exploitation of colonized peoples by colonizers. Interestingly, Fowler notes that standing amongst the prostitutes, Granger “took this demonstration as a tribute to his manhood” – here, Fowler mocks Granger for feeling masculine and powerful next to the girls, yet has not yet seemed to realize that he himself is the epitome of a colonial exploiter. 

Indeed, the way in which the women in The Quiet American are treated and viewed, serves as a metaphor for the treatment of the colonized world by the European or Western colonizers. There is, firstly, Phuong's lack of control or agency in terms of her own love life and fate, which is suggestive of the impuissance of Indochina at the time. This lack of control is one that is imposed on Phuong by her sister, who seems to have an attitude of collaboration with the colonizers: she is pragmatic in her actions, seeking financial security for her sister and perhaps herself by taking advantage of the men's weakness for docile, loyal, beautiful women. Then, the element of exoticism is evident in the novel, and the glorification of Phuong as the perfect, quiet, servile East-Asian woman symbolizes how colonizers conceivably wish the colonized people behaved. But beyond a mere exotification of the Vietnamese woman, the stereotypes to which she falls victim ultimately make of her nothing more than an “other”, someone different, less intelligent, less cultured and less civilized than Fowler, who in this instance represents the colonial power. 

Last, there is, of course, the exploitation of Phuong and of the prostitutes in a Vietnamese brothel – they are straight-forward metaphors for the exploitation of the man-power, the women, the children, the resources and the land of the colonized nations. All of these points demonstrate the mentality of Fowler and of his white friends. The way in which the women in The Quiet American are treated, thoroughly mirrors the way in which Indochina and the colonized world was treated, and the exploitative behavior of Thomas Fowler is largely indicative of his hypocritical imperialistic mindset.