Re: AMERICAN GENE GOING TITS UP AS WE SPEAK.
The Storytellers of Empire
By Kamila Shamsie February 2012
Captivated by an image of an atom bomb falling on Japan, Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why, "Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won?t."
"Of course you?ve read John Hersey?s
Hiroshima," a friend of mine said when I mentioned that atom bombs had taken up residence in my mind. I hadn?t. But I went and found it in a bookshop; it was appealingly slim enough to buy and bring home. As I read it in a single sitting I found, on page forty-six, this image of Hiroshima minutes after the bomb fell:
"On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos."
Then, of course, there's [Hersey?s] vision of the American army as a sort of United Colors of Benetton in the fall collection?s Combat Pants.
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.
<DIR>Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world?"
Hersey chooses to make this explicit in his foreword to the novel:
"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.
That is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade, who understand the ways and have listened to their parents sing the folk songs and have tasted the wine of the land on the palate of their memories. This is a lucky thing for America. We are very lucky to have our Joppolos. It is another reason why I think you should know the story of this particular Joppolo.
The moment you say, a male American writer can?t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don?t tell those stories.
Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won?t. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America?s imaginative engagement with my nation.
Excerpts from:
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/3458/shamsie_02_01_2012/</DIR>
