A Hyperreality
All Simulacra.
A Second Haiku (because):
territory but then all
is just hyperreal.
Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity.Achebe is playing with the idea that a nation, like a person, has a psychology. In 1975, however, psychology was still relatively psychoanalytic; as I understand, concepts like repression and the tripartite mind were still in use. (This is in comparison with today, where these ideas are largely relegated to folk psychology and are widely considered pseudoscientific.) Freudian psychology considers the mind to be determined by subconscious and irrational urges and desires. These desires are formed as a result of early experiences and are almost always sexual in nature. The thing to take away from this is: if Achebe believes that a nation can be analyzed as though it were an individual, then that nation is subject to the same irrational urges as an individual. More importantly, its processes should be considered as the manifestations of repressed sexual desires.
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth."The idea of a nation being an individual leads to numerous psychological implications, some of them amusing (e.g. we seemed to have manifested our Oedipus complex somewhere around the American Revolution), some of them less so (e.g. repression of unwanted "behaviors," i.e. people, typically women or minorities). However, it also says something about responsibility: if nations are like individuals, then they behave like individuals. And if they behave like individuals, then they, like individuals, are accountable for their actions. So, nations are morally responsible for their behavior, and when their behavior violates certain moral norms, they deserve to be punished as a whole, to follow Achebe's analysis.
Virginia Woolf would not have a positive reaction to this song due to the way it asserts a separation between men and women. The declaration that “this one is for the girls” does not contain the smallest hint of androgyny. It does, however, show a sense of sisterhood and female relationship, but even that relationship is one that patriarchy assumes exists. It does not open our eyes to the secret complexities in the relationships between women in the same way that the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” might. The women in this song are reacting to the pressures to look good and be in love. The reactionary nature of this song about girls only perpetuates gender divisions.
Simone de Beauvoir would not appreciate that this song suggests that there is a female essence, especially in the lines “we’re all the same inside from 1 to 99.” Her existential might appreciate the focus on female experience, rather than essence for most of the song (even though that experience is very narrow) but it all gets undone in that line. Not all women are the same inside. It is fortunate that this song does not portray women as either irrational or mysterious. It shows a genuine experience of women in patriarchy, what it feels like for them to be a “second sex.” The lyrics of the song also focus on a woman’s dreams (when it says, “this one is for the girls who love without holding back, who dream with everything they have”), suggesting her transcendence rather than being pure immanence. Even that quote, however might suggest that part of a woman’s worth is in loving with all she has (a man?). There is not a hint of motherhood in the song. It could be a spinster song.
I was going to go about looking at the rest of our feminists, but that would be very long, so for those of you who love to comment, feel free to take on the other feminists too.