2. Cultural and religious otherness
‘[M]y space … [is] something that one really only learns from other people,’ says Spivak. (1990, 68) This discursive space is not only the space that separates you, but also the one you share with others from your culture. Shadia certainly carries the cultural codes and prejudices of her parents. They are activated even more outside her home.
What distinguishes their community from the British, are hospitality and the strictly codified rules of well behaviour, among the rest. A humorous example is her telephone conversation with Fareed in the course of which they are required to follow strict rules: to listen for a certain amount of time, then to speak equally long. This civility at times borders with hypocrisy, as when her mother rubs soap into her eyes on the funeral of Fareed’s father so that she appears to be moaning him, whereas she should be joyous now Fareed, and, through him, she is the heir to the fortune her father-in-law has left behind.
Compared to her cultural standards, Bryan is ‘devoid of manners’ (101): they are in the same class yet he sometimes greets her, sometimes not; he does not sit straight in his chair; he throws paper into the rubbish bin from his chair; the mumbles; and the list is almost endless and not without a dose of ridicule from Aboulela.
Apart from the impoliteness, and the ‘famous British reserve’ to which the manuals for international students warn her (101), the foreign country always represents a source for ‘sensational’ (103) things to write about to her sister: that somebody wrote HIV on the washroom mirror in lipstick, that there was hail or that they drive on the left. Even the rhetoric of the short story is inspired by cultural difference. ‘Gilt was cold like the fog of this city,’ (103) – the narrator will tell us when Shadia fears she will not pass her exams because she does not understand what they are learning.
The cultural differences Aboulela gives voice to ought to be taken with precaution since they are filtered through the prism of a heroine who, we are told, never keeps company with home students, and, during the weekends, never talks to anybody. Before she becomes acquainted with Bryan, she communicates solely with students form the ‘Third World’. What image, then, can she offer about the British, which would not be, at the least, superficial and shallow, determined by the prejudice of her culture?
The most determining part of that culture, and even a priori to that culture, according to Aboulela, is religion.5F
Here, in a foreign land, the religion of the forsaken ancestors is posed in an essential purity and they imagine they are cherishing it better than their parents who remained ‘there, at home’ … Fundamentalists are more fundamental when they lose all material ties, inventing a ‘we’ which is a pure symbolism; in the absence of a grounds it roots itself in ritual until it accomplishes its essence, which is the sacrifice. (Кристева 2005, 262)
Shadia becomes more religious on foreign grounds. She admits to Bryan that she used to sleep in the mornings when she heard the call to prayer; now, when she cannot hear it, she prays every day. One morning she forgets to pray and feels like striding the streets naked. Her new religious Puritanism surprises Fareed as well. When she warns him over the phone not to purchase gold toilet seats as Allah will punish them, he reminds her that the seats will only be gold-coloured and does not consider changing his mind. ‘Since when have you become so religious!’ he exclaims (114). What he cannot discern is that Shadia has become more religious since she met Bryan. The reason for this is, most probably, the feeling of guilt because she is being unfaithful to Fareed and her family (although only platonically), as well as her need to force herself to see Bryan as the other.
According to Spivak, religion allows us to create an ‘immediately approachable ‘other’, without tangling in the problems of racism or exploitation’ (2003, 115). Shadia also employs religion in this sense. Like a drowning person at a straw, she clutches at what she believes will be the most unfamiliar to him. One can only imagine her fear when he informs her he has learned about her religion at school and has been to Mecca! What a relief is then felt in her ‘Оh,’ once she hears it had only been ‘In a book.’ She enquires what he believes in and, surprised when he admits he does not believe she exclaims, ‘That’s terrible! That’s really terrible!’ (112)
Instead of a typical encounter between a dominant and oppressed culture and depreciation, which we are conditioned to expect in such moments, we witness the opposite. Shadia is the one who is unprepared to accept Bryan’s difference. To defend herself against all these unexpected statements while they are drinking coffee, she rises and, about to leave, tauntingly suggests he should accept her faith. Again another blow: Bryan responds he would not mind this because he enjoyed the book, while her eyes fill with tears. She will cry only on one more occasion, at the museum of Africa in Aberdeen6F, which they visit at Bryan’s request.
As Shadia enters the museum with him, she appears to be entering the heart of Eurocentrism. She expects to see the sun, boats on the Nile and minarets. She is welcomed by a stark contrast: Africa tamed by the first colonisers and harmless enough to be placed in a museum or any other encyclopaedia of colonialism. In other words, it is an abstract vision and a construct, which only extols the bravery of the first ‘explorers’ who conquered an unfamiliar continent.
‘There is no … collective memory … But there is collective conditioning’ asserts Susan Sontag. Memory is local and individual and disappears along with the ones who remember. On the other hand, ‘collective memory is not a memory but a contract’ (2006, 87, 89). Certainly one nation favours its collective memories and exhibits in a museum only those images which support, and, naturally, construct those memories; therefore this museum of Africa favours as a subtext the heroism of the explorers, to the suffering of the natives. Once again Sontag reminds us: ‘A visit to a museum or a gallery is a social activity … Museums have evolved into more than … leisure [and] a warehouse/storage room … The basic function of the museum is entertainment and education … as well as advertising experiences, tastes and simulacra.’ (121)
Our hero, likewise, is predetermined and fixed by his culture, education and tastes. At the museum he studiously reads everything and decodes the messages of his own culture. They tell him that the imperialists were heroes who wished to escape from home. This latter part reveals the extent to which he cannot surpass his own personal experiences and prejudice – he sees these personages of the past in a manner he would like to see himself, as people who have managed to escape from home.
Regarding this visit, Jason Cowley claims that ‘intrigued by her exotic difference, [Bryan] fails to realise … that, for Shadia, Aberdeen has its own perplexing exoticism.’ (Cowley, 2000) Shadia too has created her own abstract version of Scotland (to her liking, surely – cold, discriminating and unmannerly, among the rest). However, Bryan’s blindness is a beginner’s misjudgement. When he sees her in tears, he is ready to change.
He said, ‘Museums change; I can change…’
He didn’t know it was a steep path she had no strength for. He didn’t understand. Many things, years and landscapes, gulfs. If she was strong she would have explained and not tired of explaining. She would have patiently taught him another language, letters curved like the epsilon and gamma he knew from mathematics. She would have showed him that words could be read from right to left. If she was not small in the museum, if she was really strong, she would have made his trip to Mecca real, not only in a book. (119)
I will only partially agree with Brendan Smyth that ‘[b]oth she and Brian are victims of the misrepresentation of her culture’ at the museum. (Smyth 2007, 171) I believe they are equally victims of her own relentless need to protect her integrity and her misconceptions related to his culture. Aboulela herself states ‘she is the one who is unable or unwilling to be a catalyst for [his] change.’ (2007) The museum in the title of the short story is the museum they visit, but also the virtual museum she has built about the ‘First World’ in herself.
Fortunately, if she does not accept and has no strength, at least the narrator, and Aboulela with him, leave a possibility, an ‘if’, which might be realised in another occasion, under different circumstances.
3. Educational otherness
The first allusion to western education is the ‘white scribbles’ on the board Shadia does not understand. She is familiar with the notations only, but is unable to follow how the formulas lead to one another and understands almost nothing of what they are studying. (99). Indeed, mathematics to someone uninitiated seems unreal, like hieroglyphs – as the Arabic alphabet seems to the uninitiated. The problem, still, is the fact that Shadia is not uninitiated, she is only not initiated in Eurocentric mathematics.
The formulation above sounds unconvincing due to the prejudice we share about the universality of mathematic language, as abstract and freed of context, nevertheless, Alan J. Bishop calls into our attention the fact that ‘[m]athematical ideas, like any other ideas, are humanly constructed’ and ‘have a cultural history’(Bishop 1995,72). He goes even further to assert that although many nations have participated in the development of mathematics, it is legitimate to speak of a ‘western mathematics’ for it is western European culture which has disseminated it as one of the ‘secret weapons’ for ‘cultural invasion’ and ‘continuation of cultural imperialism.’ Not only did it impose its symbols and concepts by means of trade, administration and education, but also the very values implicit in those symbols and concepts: the western values of rationalism, objectism, power and control7F. Whereas, students who prepared for higher education in the European centres were ‘educated away from their culture and away from their society’ and subjected to a ‘deliberate strategy of acculturation’. (73-76)
Aboulela appears to have this acculturation in mind when she plays with the mathematical allusions in the short story. Linear Modules is the first statistics class named for us, and is a symbol of the linearity of ‘western’ and patriarchal culture. Linearity is also present in Eurocentric writing. In her intriguing study of cultural fixation performed by professors of English language, Alastair Pennycook indicates that students are ‘fixed and defined and determined by their cultures.’ The manner they behave is also construed: they write circularly, they only memorise the material, they quote too much, they start with false premises and they cannot support their arguments (1998, 187-189). Namely, English language professors have fixed expectations from the students depending on their origin even before they check their knowledge. These expectations in relation to the students of the ‘Third World’ are that they do not follow the linear western logic. If this applies to the foreign language professors, I cannot see why it should not be applicable to mathematics professors as well.
Bryan feels comfortable in the cultural hegemony of Eurocentric mathematics. He graduated with First Class Honours at the same faculty, he easily follows postgraduate studies lectures and he is due to get a Distinction. He is familiar with the lecturers and the system to such a degree that he can afford to treat them as equals and not to speak to them with respect (once again a reminder of the cultural difference with the stricter education in Africa, at least at the time when Aboulela studied there8F). Unlike him, Shadia is frustrated because she cannot find her way along the corridors, she manipulates with the photocopying machine with difficulty, she cannot manage to find the books she needs at the library, she does not write neatly like Bryan and she even smears his notebook with tears. At times, she almost seems she might persuade both us and herself that all of these are criteria for having or not having mathematical knowledge.
‘Us and them, she thought. The ones who would do well, the ones who would crawl and sweat and barely pass. Two predetermined groups.’ (100) In a certain sense Shadia is right, the former are imbued in Eurocentric mathematics and understand it. However, irony lies in the fact that this successful group is represented by only two Europeans who distinguish themselves from the class: a girl from Spain, who is a stranger likewise, and a poor Scotsman, who is a stranger in terms of class.
In fact, Shadia disproves her theory. Later we learn ‘His notes were the knowledge she needed, the gaps,’ (106) in mathematics, and in his culture as well. Once she has filled these gaps and gained knowledge, she no longer considers herself subjugated. Quite the opposite, she becomes arrogant towards Bryan. It appears she will never overcome the inherent (perhaps retaliatory and safe) feeling of superiority.9F
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5. Aboulela perceives religion ‘as a very private, personal thing’ and says, ‘I can carry [it] with me wherever I go, whereas the other things can easily be taken away from me.’ (quoted in Sethi 2005). At the same time religion, for her, is something universal, surpassing individual and cultural differences, something ‘beyond the political’. (Aboulela 2007) Thus, religion, in her view, is something prior to the political, prior to the cultural and prior to the individual, which is to say that she considers herself determined mostly by her religion.
6. The Marischal Museum is not entirely devoted to Africa. A virtual tour of the collection which includes exhibits from Africa is available at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/virtualmuseum/index.php?page=southgallery
7. Bishop indicates how destructive these values are to the cultures like Navaho where it is believed that the phenomena are in constant flux and cannot be isolated and some African cultures where the objects are unknowable. (72,74)
8. Aboulela also did postgraduate studies in statistics, but in London.
9. It is interesting to note that the small and oppressed individuals (even nations) always need myths about small, yet cunning characters, of the type of the Macedonian Itar Pejo, who defy tyranny. This is a sort of escape from imperialistic rule for those not strong enough to free themselves. There lies a great satisfaction, at least, in the idea that you are considerably smarter than your opponent (whether it be Ottomans, Greeks or ‘stupid’ Americans). We might recall sour grapes and sweet lemon here.