the middle way....

"How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way" (89)?

I found this passage to be a strong demonstration of a counter-argument to both modern and historical attitudes toward the idea of the exotic and enigmatic Oriental man. I am at a loss to describe the feelings evoked by this book and as if I have little right to write about it at all, it's that good. Let's begin with the broad strokes: post-colonial Africa was neither post-colonial, nor was it Africa. The deep and irreversible impression left by Great Britain (and the other colonizers) penetrated so deep into the consciences of the individual that the passage above is a plea for reason. A man, an African man, can not understand how he himself can be perceived as Other to such an extent.

We are inside of the writer's conscience, the writer is a man like any other man. Yet when he is in contact with the colonizer - whether in Africa or in England - he is not a man at all; in the mind of the colonizer he is all that is mysterious, all that is Other. The use of the words "created on the Equator" evokes, even as I try to be objective, an image to my mind that includes jungles, primordial soup, and fossilized footprints in the desert. The counter-argument is not just a plea to the past, I am proof; if I can not conceive of the Other Oriental, the African of Sir Lawrence, without such nonsense clouding my mind, what sense can be made of the sentence?

"Some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god," but no one regards him as a man. The mean to which Salih refers - the middle way - is, I argue, recognition as a Man. Indeed, I have no difficulty conceptualizing the position at the exact middle of the spectrum between god and slave as man. I'm not sure that I will ever be able to conceive of man in any other way.

Salih brings truth through metaphor. The Hegelian Grand Narrative of Great Britain places men like Salih in a category that alienates all of his "kind" in an object position. Orientals are something to be studied, something in which one can be a specialist, a problem that begs solution, a department at Oxford. No Oriental - that grand and sweeping category that encompasses anything in its path, like a tidal wave - can possibly be in the middle space. Salih refrains, if only momentarily, from poetic language in this plea.

The story is told of a culture that has been in an object position for so long that it can only scream for recognition. "We are men, the location of our birth is but an accident of fate. How can you not see that we are just men? This is the counter-story to your story of us, let us tell you what is true: we are men."