‘Elsewhere’
BORDERS, FRONTIERS,
LITERATURE
Key themes
Home, migration, identity
‘Otherness’
History
Language
2
Space, place and time in
Waiting for the Barbarians
“… At home everyone wears them.”
“I ask,” I continue, “only because if you get lost it
becomes our task here to find you and bring you back
to civilization.” We pause, savouring from our different
positions the ironies of the word.
… And here I am patching up relations between the
men of the future and the men of the past, returning,
with apologies, a body we have sucked dry — a gobetween, a jackal of Empire in sheep's clothing!
3
Waiting… for the barbarians
“Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I
observed that once in every generation, without
fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the
barbarians. There is no woman living along the
frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian
hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle,
no man who has not frightened himself with
visions of the barbarians carousing in his home,
breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains,
raping his daughters. These dreams are the
consequence of too much ease. Show me a
barbarian army and I will believe.”
4
For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent
pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid
Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself
when times are easy, he the truth that Empire
tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of
imperial rule, no more, no less.
…Thus I seduced myself, taking one of the many
wrong turnings I have taken on a road that looks
true but has delivered me into the heart of a
labyrinth.
5
Freedom and its price
I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance
with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set
myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a
free man. Who would not smile? But what a
dangerous joy! It should not be so easy to attain
salvation. And is there any principle behind my
opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into
a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians
usurping my desk and pawing my papers?
6
Freedom and its price
I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance
with the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set
myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a
free man. Who would not smile? But what a
dangerous joy! It should not be so easy to attain
salvation. And is there any principle behind my
opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into
a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians
usurping my desk and pawing my papers?
7
‘allegory’ n.
a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in
which properties and circumstances attributed to
the apparent subject really refer to the subject they
are meant to suggest; an extended or continued
metaphor.
OED Online
http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/5230
8
The rise and fall of Empires
“They [the ancient slips written in a lost
language] form an allegory. They can be read in
many orders. Further, each single slip can be
read in many ways. Together they can be read
as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a
plan of war, or they can be turned on their sides
and read as a history of the last years of the
Empire-the old Empire, I mean…
9
The rise and fall of Empires
Empire has created the time of history. Empire
has located its existence not in the smooth
recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the
seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of
beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire
dooms itself to live in history and plot against
history. One thought alone preoccupies the
submerged mind of Empire: how not to end,
how not to die, how to prolong its era.
10
‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston
Hughes
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Key themes
Home, migration, identity
‘Otherness’
History
Language
12