Maps and Borders

Societies seem to have a fascination with establishing borders. The world is broken into continents. North America is broken into countries. America is broken into states. South Dakota is broken into counties. These subdivisions can certainly be useful for a wide variety of reasons, such as giving geographical context or providing a sense of community. Unfortunately, that same sense of community that borders provide can often have negative, exclusionary effects. In addition, not all these borders that humans set are physical. Often times, it is a community's cultural borders that prevent foreign ideas--even important or useful ones--from gaining traction.

In Tayeb Salih's short story, "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid," the narrator paints a powerful picture of how important the titular doum tree has become to the people of an unnamed village. The tree serves as the tomb of Wad Hamid, an escaped slave who was granted visions from God. Somehow, this resulted in the village coming into being, though none know the details. The doum tree that grew over Wad Hamid's tomb became a religious icon to the people of the village, and it came to dominate much of their culture. In fact, the tree is likely a metaphor for culture in general. As the narrator points out, no one planted it. It just grew on its own, though no one knows quite when. This is similar to how culture tends to develop naturally without any specific intention, any meaning often reduced to tradition within a few generations. In fact, a person will even often refer to their cultural background as their "roots."

The doum tree is portrayed as vital to the villagers' culture. The people visit it to pray and rely on it for healing and other spiritual needs. The flies that the tree attracts often aid them in driving out unwanted forces--and there are certainly enough unwanted forces to drive out. A preacher decides, following an experience with fly bites, malaria, and dysentery, that his services may not actually be needed. A planed installation of a water-pump where the doum tree stands is met with enough resistance that the government trying to enact the agricultural scheme gives up. Two separate attempts to make a stopping-place for a steamer at the doum tree's location are halted. The first attempt is dismissed at a mere refusal, but when the second attempt is more aggressive, the villagers "took them by the scuffs of their necks, hurled them into the water, and went off to [their] work" (Norton 826). Twenty men are then arrested until, a month later, they are released to fanfare that they do not entirely understand. Apparently, their arrest sparked national unrest, and upon their release, a member of Parliament speaks out against the government interfering with holy beliefs.

However, the narrator indicates that this is not necessarily a good thing. He laments the lack of asphalt roads and modern transports early in the story, and it later becomes clear that the village's opposition to modern progress is the source of this lament. While the people are satisfied with their current lives, they are outright rejecting concepts that could make them more comfortable. The narrator also indicates that the village is stagnant, saying that "Its population neither increases nor decreases, while its appearance remains unchanged." He continues by noting that they have entirely isolated themselves from the rest of the world, since "Two years passed without our knowing what form the government had taken, black or white" (822). The villagers may be content as they are, yes, but they are ignorant and unable to progress. Humanity is leaving them behind.

In the end, the issue of cultural borders in "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid" is one that goes both ways. While the people of the village are driving attempts to make their lives easier, their reactions may not have been so fierce had the foreign influences attempting to enact those changes made an attempt to understand the village's reverence for the doum tree. Each side of the conflict believes their own ideas to be the only reasonable option, but the narrator points out how unnecessary the conflict ultimately is. "What all these people have overlooked," he says, "is that there's plenty of room for all these things: the doum tree, the tomb, the water-pump, and the steamer's stopping-place" (824). These icons, these ideas--they are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. It is only the cultural borders these people are erecting that are keeping the village from progressing.

Source:

Salih, Tayeb. "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid." Norton Anthology of World Literature: Volume F. Ed. Puchner, Martin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. 816-824. Print.

Products of Our Time

Works are, as we've discussed in class, products of their times. How can they be otherwise? But what happens when works exist in multiple times?

The X-Men made their debut in 1963. The comic focuses on a team of mutants being trained to use their powers in ways beneficial to humanity. However, there is a great prejudice against mutants, and because of that, there are mutants who wish to dominate humanity as the "superior" race.

It should be no surprise to learn that these comics about a group facing discrimination, written during one of the most turbulent civil rights movements in American history, touches heavily on themes of racism. The leaders of two of the most prominent mutant groups are Professor Charles Francis Xavier (or "Professor X") and Max "Magneto" Eisenhardt. Professor X wants to advance mutants in society and live peacefully with humans, while Magneto desires a more dramatic change, where mutants are treated as superior. These views are respectively similar to the opinions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who were both active at the time of the X-Men's publication, and further development of both of these characters has incorporated more of these two civil rights leaders into their representative characters.

Clearly, the X-Men comics were a product of the civil rights movement of the time. However, the X-Men still enjoy a fair amount of popularity today. Racism still exists, naturally, but it is now generally seen as backwards, and the themes of persecution are not nearly as effective today as they would have been when the comics were originally published. So then why are the X-Men so popular?

The answer is that the idea of being persecuted as an outsider is one that will never be restricted to one particular time. The group being persecuted may change, but homogenous groups will always strike out against those who are different.

When the X-Men films brought the franchise more heavily into the public eye in the 2000's, the filmmakers decided that the social commentaries of the X-Men were currently more well-suited to another civil rights movement: that of LGBT rights. X-Men 2 in particular started focusing heavily on these themes and the LGBT rights movement started gaining momentum, and was a deliberate choice on the part of the director, who was himself gay (see this interview). The film is not even particularly subtle, going as far as to include the line "have you tried not being a mutant?"

It's true that all texts are a product of their time. X-Men shows that, as times change, texts can change to reflect them. The overall theme--the persecution of minorities--remains the same because that theme endures in various forms. However, that theme holds a different significance for different generations. In this way, X-Men is able to touch on important themes from both the 1960's and the 2000's without sacrificing what the text is actually about.

If this can hold true for this text, can it hold true for other texts?  Can modern interpretations of older texts maintain the purpose of the text but remain relevant to the modern day? I believe so. Something does not cease to be relevant simply because the era it has written in has passed. While the specific situations may not apply to our lives, there is often, like in X-Men, an broader underlying theme relating the the specific one--a broader theme that is timeless.