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Fascinating piece by Margaret Drabble in the TLS on cultural appropriation,
an issue that has been preoccupying me in various ways. - The idea of
pre-publication "peer review" of fiction, as if fiction is beholden to the
same ideas and standards as scholarly research, is frankly horrifying. More
grist to my conviction that imagination is illegal -
Best
A
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2111531
Safely embedded in the Sixth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English
Literature (2000) is an explosive entry on cultural appropriation. Explosive
not because it is written in an inflammatory manner (it is notable for its
objectivity and even-handedness), but because of its subject matter. It
appears anonymously, as do all the entries in the volume, but its author,
the Guyanese-born writer Jan Lo Shinebourne, is named in the opening
credits. She bravely took on this dangerous topic, and I have been carrying
her calming definition round the world with me as a talisman. Cultural
appropriation, she notes, is a term ³in general used to describe Western
appropriation of non-Western or non-white forms, and carries connotations of
exploitation and dominance². Shinebourne belongs to the world of crossed
borders, and in her summary she covers the field, from Benin bronzes and
Lakota war shirts and the Elgin Marbles to the Modernist enthusiasm for
African art. She also comments on voice in literature: the appropriation of
gender in James Joyce, and of ethnicity in Gertrude Stein. The field she
covers is a minefield.
Irecently returned from a literary conference on ³Writing for Peace² in
Seoul, where we travelled north on an outing to the 39th Parallel which
divides South and North Korea. Shortly after entering the DMZ (Demilitarized
Zone) our military escort (who looked Korean to me, but who was tentatively
identified by our American poets as a US corporal from the Midwest) pointed
to the golf course, and its sign which read ³Do not attempt to retrieve golf
balls from the minefield². This set the tone for a theatrical tour of staged
tension, where opposing armies confront one another on the most heavily
fortified frontier in the world. In ³Conference Row², which straddles the
invisible Parallel, their representatives interpenetrate, like pieces on a
chessboard, like the teeth of a pair of pinking shears. We were warned to
exchange no glance or gesture with the North Korean guards, standing at one
point only a few feet away from us. Communication of any sort was
prohibited. A smile, a frown, could be used as propaganda.
This parade of frozen aggression had the advantage of making us feel that
the cultural frontiers between West and East, between language and language,
were slightly more permeable than the political frontiers. What are
conferences for, if not for communication, exchange of ideas, suggestions
for translations? Many pious hopes for peace and friendship were aired, and
we discovered areas of common ground. Korean scholars spoke of Kant and
Derrida and Edward Said and Carl Schmitt. The Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe
quoted from T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas and William Blake. Kenyan-born
Ngugi Wa Thiong¹o diplomatically deployed Aimé Césaire¹s aphorism, ³Contact
between cultures is the oxygen of civilization², and I brought out E. M.
Forster¹s ³Only connect². George Orwell¹s ghost was omnipresent. It seemed
that, at one level, we were getting on famously, mingling languages and
cultures, reciting our poems, and understanding one another well.
But behind this façade of good manners, communication was not simple.
Resentments and misunderstandings were dormant, and from time to time
erupted. Koreans protested that the cultural traffic was flowing in one
direction. The English language was perceived as dominant and exploitative.
I was told that Korean children, forced by ambitious parents to learn
English too young, have a habit of falling psychotically silent in all
languages. The phrase ³world literature² usually means ³Western literature²,
argues the distinguished éminence grise of the Forum, Professor Uchang Kim,
an intellectual famed for the brilliant obscurity of his spoken discourse
and his shining clarity on the page. The novelist Hwang Seok-Young, a
combative, once imprisoned, and now much translated writer, argued that what
we call universality is a fallacy of Eurocentrism, a boundary put in place
by those with power: when Goethe advocated ³world literature² he thought the
world was Europe. Park Wan-Suh, a celebrated woman novelist (b 1931) who
lived through the Japanese Occupation and the Korean War, recorded that when
interviewed in France in 1997 about influences on her work, she had
mentioned several important Korean writers and one or two Westerners. When
she saw the clip of the interview only the names of Dostoevsky and Chekhov
had survived in translation. None of the Koreans was cited. She felt they
had been stepped over, as though they were ants.
The West has some legitimate problems of perception. Koreans joke that their
family names are notoriously similar, with a predominance of Kim, Park and
Lee, and variations of transliteration make these names even more difficult
to learn and retain. Nevertheless, we took Mrs Park¹s point. In an
underlying agenda, American and European participants were being urged to
connect with Korean literature, to listen to Korean poetry, to enter into a
two-way discourse, to balance exports with imports.
There were, for me, many painful ironies in these sometimes unspoken
suggestions and negotiations. I had first visited Seoul five years before,
in 2000, as a guest of the First Seoul International Forum for Literature,
on the theme of ³Writing across Boundaries: Literature in the multicultural
world². I had delivered an innocently academic paper on issues of
post-colonialism ( The Tempest , Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Naipaul, Marina
Warner, Said on Mansfield Park ), which as far as I know caused no offence.
But that visit moved me to read a celebrated Korean literary masterpiece,
the Han Joon Nok , in a translation recommended to me by a scholar in the
Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum in London. This is
a book of memoirs written by a Crown Princess of Korea who died, at the age
of eighty, in 1815. It had an overpowering effect on me, and I could not get
it out of my mind. If anything is world literature, this work is. This woman
and her story haunted me. I sought other translations, read as much
contemporary material as I could find in English (there are some very fine
poems of the period), visited galleries and exhibitions and lectures, and
revisited Korea to see the palace where the Princess had been immured for
most of her adult life.
If the Forum had intended to arouse my interest in Korean culture, it had
succeeded beyond expectation. I decided to try to write a novel based on the
Crown Princess¹s extraordinary story and my response to it a response
which was, of course, as closely connected to life in the West today as to
the historical facts of life in the eighteenth-century Chosun court. This
was to be a transcultural novel, a novel which raised questions about
cultural relativism and essentialism, family dynamics, learned and innate
responses, evolutionary biology and the universality (or not) of the Oedipus
complex. One of my models was Mark Twain¹s time-travel fantasy A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur¹s Court (1889), with its darkly comic double take on
American capitalism and Camelot chivalry. My Crown Princess would glance at
the death penalty in the United States, and the abuse of the Hippocratic
oath in Britain, with the hindsight of 200 years of history, and pronounce
her damning verdict on progress.
Drawing on a Korean narrative for The Red Queen was a foolhardly enterprise,
and I was well aware of the dangers, dangers which were an integral part of
my theme. Being aware, I proceeded, as I thought, in a correct manner,
contacting the most recent and most scholarly New York-based translator,
and, through her, the American publishers, and declaring my interest. My
translator and I agreed detailed acknowledgement of sources and payment for
use of copyright material as appropriate, and I proposed the inclusion of a
foreword and afterword by her which could place my fictional efforts in a
critical context. I envisaged, with what now seems like a childish naivety,
the possibility of shared platforms and public discussions.
For a year or two, I thought I had been welcomed over the boundary into a
neutral zone, but I was to discover that I had entered the battlefield of
accusations of Orientalism and cultural appropriation, of ignorance,
cynicism and plagiarism.
Novelists are always nervous when they hand over the product of three years
of solitary labour to a new reader, and I was apprehensive about what I had
done, but I had not expected either the tone or the content of the response
I received from my first reader in New York. I had tried to behave
correctly, but I had not been correct enough. My attitude towards the
original classic Korean text was, according to the view from American
academe, full of ³egregious error². American academe, appearing to speak on
behalf of and in defence of Korea, declared that The Red Queen was full of
crimes, the least of which was a reference to Korea in the eighteenth
century as a frozen land and, by implication, a ³hermit kingdom². This
latter phrase has been used by Koreans and Westerners for centuries,
referring to the Chosun dynasty¹s undisputed policy of isolationism, but it
is, I was told, no longer correct. We are now to believe that the Koreans
never were and are not now hermits. They welcome cultural interchange and
debate. Nevertheless, the phrase ³hermit kingdom² was not to be used, and
the publication of my novel could not be approved. The position seemed to me
to be paradoxical. (When I commented recently on the fact that the much
praised exhibition entitled Encounters: The meeting of Asia and Europe
15001800 , at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004, contained only one
Korean artefact amid a profusion of images from China, Japan and India, I
was informed by the curators that this was because there were so few
encounters. However, it is incorrect to refer to the ³hermit kingdom².)
My novel, I was told, would probably be greeted with ridicule in the United
States, because ³educated readers² in the US are aware of issues of
multiculturalism, and indeed many universities include a one-year course in
non-Western civilization in their degree requirement. Had I never heard of
Edward Said? (His ideas are embedded throughout my text, and his name
appears towards the end, but I don¹t think my would-be censor got that far.)
Was
I not familiar with the debate over Madame Butterfly ? I had Orientalized
the Crown Princess or had I perhaps Westernized her? Objections came from
both sides. It was not clear to me whether I had made her too feeble or too
strong-minded, but whatever I had done, it was not condoned. I had also, in
an attempt at even- handedness, Orientalized the Romanovs, whose barbaric
home life comes in for criticism from my time-and-space-travelling narrator.
(My comments on the American twentieth-century habit of executing minors and
the criminally insane, a practice condemned within the last months by the US
Supreme Court, went unnoticed.) My interpretation of Lady Hong, or the Lady
Hyegyong, was inadmissible. It was not even clear which of her names I was
allowed to use.
This Korean author, whose words had moved and inspired me, died in 1815. She
was disadvantaged in life, and she was being censored, it seemed to me, in
death. These objections came not from her own country of Korea, but from the
standpoint of contemporary American political correctness, which claimed the
right to halt my publication. Was it not the practice in England, I was
asked, to submit one¹s work to peer review? Was this practice uncommon in
fiction-writing?
Ihad clearly caused great offence; I was, in turn, offended. I readily admit
to unintended factual errors, some of which could have been removed by a
more tactful response. It was a mistake to describe the floors of the Korean
central-heating system (the famous ondol flooring) as wooden: they are made
of stone covered in varnished paper. It was a mistake to refer to Koreans
being obliged to compose the infamous Chinese ³eight-legged essays². It was
not a mistake to suggest that the Crown Princess might have seen some
Western works of art brought to China by the Jesuits, though it was
improbable that she had. (I needed to suppose that she had, because I needed
to invoke the question of artistic perspective, a concept introduced into
Korea at this period.) I was probably right in guessing that she had not
heard of her contemporary
Voltaire, but wrong to suppose that she could have read Freud or The Golden
Bough by Sir James Frazer, or known about immune- deficiency disorders or
stem-cell research.
Enough of this nightmare. It was clear that the level of misunderstanding
was profound, and that the kind of critique being offered was irrelevant to
my purpose, and directed at some book other than the one I had hoped to
write. In my view, copyright was being used as a form of censorship, but it
is by no means clear what copyright resides in one translation of an ancient
text, particularly when there are other translations available, and the
facts are in the domain of history. The novel I actually wrote received no
critical attention, either hostile or appreciative. I was accused of
appropriation, and that was that. The multicultural censor looked no
further. No questions were asked about my text, my intentions, my meaning. I
did have a meaning, or I once thought that I did. I was so profoundly
shocked that I hardly knew what I had done.
Appropriation, like racism, is an ugly word and an easy allegation, not
easily addressed in the courts. The nature and ethics of cultural
transmission are endlessly fascinating. When is a borrowing a theft, and
when is it a benign sign of cross-cultural fertilization? Is there some
common source from which all stories rise? It is strange how subjects catch
the Zeitgeist: witness the recent crop of novels inspired by the life of
Henry James (and watch out for Wendy Lesser¹s forthcoming addition to them,
The Pagoda in the Garden ). Closer to the Orientalist theme, one notes a
bizarre clustering of versions of Laclos¹s 1782 novel, Les Liaisons
dangereuses , which was adapted by Christopher Hampton for the stage in 1985
and for the screen in 1988. While Hampton and Stephen Frears were working on
their film, the director Milos Forman was simultaneously and coincidentally
at work on his, which appeared in 1989 under the title Valmont , Hampton¹s
version having pre-emptively appropriated the original title. Years later
came the Korean version of Laclos, screened in England in 2005 as Untold
Scandal , and set in the eighteenth-century Chosun court at the same period
as the events of Han Joon Nok . This sumptuous and elegant film is a clear
example of the adoption, adaptation and Orientalization of French material:
it is equally clear that the subject reached Korea through England. This is
a devious route, but Laclos and Hampton are not calling their lawyers.
Stories travel where they will. They have a life of their own. They are not
like artefacts: they can exist in more than one place at a time.
In the British Museum there is an illuminated manuscript portraying the
lavish ceremony of 1809 that marked the sixtieth anniversary of the
consummation of the marriage of the Crown Princess to her husband, the
long-dead and brutally executed Prince Sado. Its provenance is dubious: it
was captured from its native land by a French admiral, and purchased by the
British in 1891. This too was a devious route. My novel, which discusses
some of these matters, appeared in Korea in a somewhat mutilated version
last year; I rewrote extensively, in an attempt to avoid further
difficulties, and felt unhappily driven to employ a degree of self-
censorship. After its publication, I received my invitation to the Second
International Forum for Literature, and of course was obliged to accept.
Honour compelled me to go back to Seoul to retrieve my golf balls from the
minefield. And I was curious about the response from Korean readers and
scholars. Would it be considered that I had abused historical material? Or
would I perhaps find a different level of reading? And how would my novel
look in hang¹ul ?
I encountered, as I had expected, one or two accusatory questions about
Orientalism, and some readers who seemed unable to cope with the notion that
the ³real² Princess of Han Joon Nok could have been (as she clearly was) an
unreliable narrator. But I also met with more complex, less defensive
responses. Professor Lee Young-Oak at Sungkyunkwan University (founded in
1398) had taught my novel in English, and her students and colleagues
engaged in lively discussion about tragedy and tragicomedy, female
narrative, the ethics of cross-cultural adoption of babies and books, and
the culturally-specific meanings of acacia and of magpies. This debate was
full of oxygen. It was exhilarating.
Acacia thrives in Korea. It is an import from the time of the Japanese
Occupation, and although pretty, it is also invasive, and it is driving out
native species. Magpies are thieves, and in Britain they bring bad luck. In
Korea they traditionally bring good luck, or so I was assured. But Korean
Americans have adopted the bad luck line, and in my view they therefore
misinterpret their own texts. This is confusing.
Not all the week was spent on such trivia. Ethnicity and gender were also
considered. Teaching gender studies must be uphill work: the complexion of
the conference was overwhelmingly male. There is a flourishing school of
African studies in Seoul in Hankuk University, and a surprising number of
Swahili speakers, but Korean society is far from multicultural. Ngugi¹s
response to one participant¹s comment that her three-year-old child thought
that black faces were dirty was a model of tact. If she was being
interpreted correctly, she seemed to be suggesting that racial prejudice is
innate, not learned. Children are very direct, Ngugi said, smiling mildly,
before invoking the healing words of Césaire.
The main matter of the conference was not peace but war. Great waves of
anti-Bush emotion swelled through speech after speech of helpless and
impotent rage. Five years ago, the official talk was of détente, the
Sunshine Policy and reunification. ³Peaceful and prosperous co-existence² is
the new slogan, but Korea is a weak and divided country, with the South
occupied by increasingly unwelcome American troops. Calling North Korea part
of the ³axis of evil² did incalculable harm to prospects of peace in this
much-damaged peninsula. What can writers and intellectuals do, in this
poisonous atmosphere? They mock themselves for uttering platitudes, and sign
or refuse to sign a Peace Declaration. Oe, in Japan, has founded a group of
independent intellectuals to resist re armament and Prime Minister Koizumi¹s
changes to the pacifist Japanese constitution. Oe is an engaging speaker and
a Nobel laureate, and his protests do not go unheard. The political
scientist Choi Jang-jip, of Korea University¹s Asian Study Center, spoke
passionately about the dangers of the new right-wing Japanese American
alliance, and advocated a counterbalance in the form of an East Asian Union
of economic and cultural interests. There is a palpable fear of a ³surgical
strike² by the US against North Korea, and of further military displays by
an overweening and reckless superpower. American diplomats call this new
Cold War a game of chess; for those living within an hour¹s drive of the
39th Parallel it seems less playful.
Meanwhile, as a lone female British postcolonial voice in Asia, I parroted
the words ³Only connect². But connecting, as Forster knew, is a slow and
arduous process, liable to misinterpretation. Connection without accusations
of appropriation or invasion is no easy matter.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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