The Unmanned Drone is an apt metaphor.
October 10, 2020 7:25 PM   Subscribe

The Storytellers of Empire. Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why “Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.” This long essay examines two perspectives of American writing - the most prominent perspective puts America at the center, as invader, as victim. The other perspective is exemplified by John Hersey and his work on Hiroshima - America as witness-bearer. It ends on a question: "So why is it, please explain, that you’re in our stories but we’re not in yours?" Her answer is not uplifting.
posted by storybored (15 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fascinating to read this essay, which is nine years old, and think about how much the conversation on cultural appropriation has solidified since then.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:06 PM on October 10, 2020 [3 favorites]


How to reconcile these two Americas? I didn’t even try. It was a country I always looked at with one eye shut. With my left eye I saw the America of John Hersey; with my right eye I saw the America of the two atom bombs. This one-eyed seeing was easy enough from a distance. But then I came to America as an undergraduate and realized that with a few honorable exceptions, all of America looked at America with one eye shut.

I don’t mean Americans looked at America uncritically. I mean they looked at it merely in domestic terms.
This is the most remarkable analogy I have seen to describe how so many Americans, including far too many "good liberals", live their lives inside the great colossus of white supremacist empire, sleepwalking in ignorance at their best, earnestly defending the machine at their worst, and endlessly self-centered through it all.
posted by Ouverture at 8:21 PM on October 10, 2020 [14 favorites]


Excellent read, thank you storybored.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:46 PM on October 10, 2020


This is very good and I've picked up a few books. Thanks for posting!
posted by ChuraChura at 8:59 PM on October 10, 2020


“America is an international country. Major Joppolo [the central character in the novel] is an Italian American going to work in Italy. Our army has Yugoslavs and Frenchmen and Austrians and Czechs and Norwegians in it, and everywhere our Army goes in Europe, a man can turn to the private beside him and say: ‘Hey, Mac, what’s this furriner saying? How much does he want for that bunch of grapes?’ And Mac will be able to translate."

We've lost every shred of that white multiculturalism.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 9:48 PM on October 10, 2020 [1 favorite]


Excellent. Books requested at the library...
posted by esoteric things at 10:07 PM on October 10, 2020


So why is it, please explain, that you’re in our stories but we’re not in yours?

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
posted by flabdablet at 12:32 AM on October 11, 2020 [11 favorites]


By which I mean to say that I think Karl Rove definitely counts as an American writer of fiction.
posted by flabdablet at 12:41 AM on October 11, 2020 [3 favorites]


I’ve yet to read the article, but it seems very much in the same vein as Amitav Ghosh’s examination of very adjacent questions in his recent The Great Derangement.
posted by progosk at 2:56 AM on October 11, 2020


"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad." - Frankie Boyle
posted by lalochezia at 7:04 AM on October 11, 2020 [17 favorites]


I don’t mean Americans looked at America uncritically. I mean they looked at it merely in domestic terms.

I'm Canadian and recall hearing it put thus some years back:

Problem is, Canada may have more acreage but we only have one-tenth the population. That means one-tenth the human activity, interest, busy-ness. So there just isn't that much going on hereabouts. The average remotely curious Canadian can't help but look outward for news, sports, drama, comedy, music, history even. And so we do. And then this curiosity just sort of feeds itself. We can't help but want more. Our worldview necessarily ends up including The World.

Meanwhile, one nation to the south, you've got ten times as much domestic news, sports, drama -- all of the above. So your average remotely curious American can, more or less, feed themselves on what's for sale at the local grocery (culturally speaking). It's not healthy, it's not wise, it leads to entirely decent people thinking We Are The World is somehow a nice song. This ignorance is definitely a thing.

And then there's American cultural imperialism, hegemony etc which has inevitably, ominously grown out of this ignorance. This is a whole other thing.
posted by philip-random at 8:29 AM on October 11, 2020 [5 favorites]


So there just isn't that much going on hereabouts.

I want to refute this but the Canada thing feels like a derail, so I will just strongly disagree.
posted by oulipian at 10:33 AM on October 11, 2020


See also The Hurt Locker - 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, six Oscars, best film of the year, etc...

To quote Frankie Boyle "not only will America go to your country and kill all your people but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad."
posted by happyinmotion at 1:09 PM on October 11, 2020 [2 favorites]


"Where is Joppolo the novelist?"

One answer has to do with the sociology of war. During WWII, like WWI, Korea, and Vietnam the United States drew people from across society to serve. Rich, poor, north, south were all involved. Yes, this was uneven in many ways, and antiblack racism limited black participation - the point is that these wars increasingly represented American society as a whole. You can see this in the Pentagon's policies of trying to mix many races and regions in small units during Vietnam, or by the sheer number of veterans in Congress or senior management after these wars. And you can see it in Joppolo's multinational unit.

After Vietnam that changed with the shift to a volunteer armed forces. Now the preponderance of sailors, soldiers, fliers, Marines, et al tend to be working class, and to come from the American south and west. You don't see anywhere near the pre-1975 level of veterans in in Congress or senior management.

How many will see themselves as novelists? Of those that do, how many will be able to realize the dream?
posted by doctornemo at 2:20 PM on October 11, 2020 [6 favorites]


The work references Hiroshima by John Hersey, which is also excellent.
posted by zenon at 7:22 AM on October 20, 2020


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