Between Cultures
Описание книги
Richard Burton. T. E. Lawrence. Louis Massignon. Chinua Achebe. Orhan Pamuk. The remarkable quintet whose stories make up Jerrold Seigel's Between Cultures are all people who, without ever seeking to exit from the ways of life into which they had been born, devoted themselves to exploring a second cultural identity as an intrinsic part of their first. Richard Burton, the British traveler and writer, sought to experience the inner life of Islam by making the pilgrimage to Mecca in the guise of a Muslim in 1853. T. E. Lawrence, famously known as Lawrence of Arabia, recounted his tortuous ties to the Arab uprising against Turkish rule in his celebrated Seven Pillars of Wisdom . Louis Massignon was a great, deeply introspective, and profoundly troubled French Catholic scholar of Islam. Chinua Achebe, the celebrated pioneer of modern African literature, lived and wrote from the intersection of Western culture and traditional African life. Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, explored the attraction and repulsion between East and West in his native Turkey. Seigel considers these five individuals not only for the intrinsic interest of their stories but also for the depth and breadth of their writing on the challenges of creating an intercultural identity, enabling him to analyze their experiences via historical, psychological, and critical approaches. Fascinating in and of themselves, these lives between cultures also highlight the realities faced by many in this age of high mobility and ever-greater global connection and raise questions about what it means for human beings to belong to cultures.
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Between Cultures
Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld
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But when I was amongst them in their native land, on the soil which the feet of their fathers have trod, and heard them deliver in their own native tongue stirring extempore speeches, adorned with beautiful imagery, and of half an hour’s duration; or when I was writing from their dictation, sometimes two hours in succession, without having to correct a word or alter a construction in twenty or thirty pages; or when in Sierra Leone, I attended examinations of the sons of liberated slaves in Algebra, Geometry, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.—then, I confess, any other idea never entered my mind but that I had to do with real men.
Burton followed this with similar testimonies from others who had been in like situations, and concluded: “The fact is, civilization takes too much upon herself. There is more of equality between the savage and the civilized—the difference being one of quantity, not of quality—than the latter will admit. For man is everywhere commensurate with man. Hence, whilst the average Englishman despises the Yoruba, the Yoruba ‘reciprocates’ with hate and fear.” Burton made a similar observation in a letter to his friend Monckton Milnes: “Those who talk of the benighted African should have seen the envoy who conveyed to the Governor the ultimatum of the Ashanti King. There was not a European on the coast to compare with him in dignity, self-possession and perfect savoir-faire touching the object of his mission.”51
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