Sunday, October 20, 2013

Nudge the Frame




Yesterdays segue into Afrobeat lead to some fruitful discovery on Rdio.  I found an exceptional Fela Ransome Kuti song "Alu Jon Jonki Jon" that must have been released 1972, or so.  I’ve heard so much of Fela’s music over the years, I get complacent and think I’ve heard everything.  But this track was new to me.  Good Lord.  The groove is so muscular and complete like a suspension bridge of unimpeachable confidence.  And the organ solo’s crescendo around the ninth minute is like nothing I’ve ever heard from him before.  Aggressive mounting 如火如荼[1] wall of triumphant Hammond B3 light reflected everywhere until it stops.  “Hey.”  These may be the lyrics to the song translated into English: http://www.lyricszoo.com/fela-kuti/alu-jon-jonki-jon/

I posed the question yesterday, as to what cultural, artistic tradition left China, went on to influence some other part of the world and came back in a different form, so as to then have a substantial impact on China.  The two that I’d mentioned from elsewhere were the flow of West African rhythmic sensibility to; for example, the U.S. which returns in the form of James Brown to change the way West African contemporary music was played.  The other popularly referenced example was Thoreau being influenced by Indian philosophy, having an influence on Gandhi who then influences Martin Luther King Jr. 

A few friends weighed in off line with only partly serious suggestions of chop suey  and kung fu.  The problem is these don’t really make it back to PRC and impact the place in a substantial way that fits the model.  If McDonalds began offering McSuey that thousands of stores in China served . . . if Lee Scratch Perry’s 1975 album “Kung Fu Meets the Dragon” suddenly became a national phenomenon in some Chinese Black Ark . . . But it hasn’t and there isn’t.  They don’t work.



If you could identify a seminal Chinese aspect of Christian thinking or Marxist ideology that returns with the Taiping or the Chinese Communist Party respectively, that might be closer.   More fruitful hunting, and certainly where some affinities are desperately in need of being built are in the relationship between China and Japan.  Tokyo was, of course, fertile soil for Chinese intellectuals like Liang Qichao at the beginning of the last century.  Japanese, borrowing Chinese characters, created new words from the modern world that were later adopted back into Chinese.  Numerous “western” ideas were brought into China for the first time, via Japan, where intellectuals like Liang Qichao encountered them for the first time.  And certainly the CCP continued to study Japanese means of warfare, statecraft, industrialization, commerce etc., from its inception until today.  But the flavor of this exchange is, since the war, reluctant and shrouded in mutual disdain.

I am working my way back through the “Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS) manuscript.  In the “Ira” chapter, Anger, I try to look at how anger works in myself as well as how anger is channeled in China as national policy.  I describe a time I was mugged in Brooklyn and the unfortunate if inevitable revenge fantasies that flooded my mind in the immediate thereafter involving a golf club.

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formally cultivates a national sense of victimhood for China.  Crimes generally stem from foreign aggressors and the traitorous Chinese who collaborated with them.  The enemy par excellence is the Japanese and clearly much of what the Japanese did sixty-five years ago was atrocious.  There still can be no detailed discussion of the inhuman behavior of the ruling CCP itself, during the interim period.   The sophisticated, willful propaganda effort allows for no compromises.  Everything officially supports hatred of the Japanese.  Nothing allows for a nuanced reconsideration for actions taken since the end of the war.  Hatred, wrath and everything short of physical violence are legitimized.  To insult, to scorn to cheat, to shove a contemporary Japanese person is to do one for the team and assuage one’s ancestors who suffered so much unforgivable abuse at the hands of that foreign nation.  To muse on swinging the golf club is understandable.  But the national cultivation of vengeance three generations on is a horrible, self-mutilating, aberration.  China’s civil society and domestic forum of permissible public discourse may not presently be strong enough, in the moment, to check that swing.  The hate loop doesn’t seem to be facilitating much healing.”


If China is ready to face some of its own recent history as discussed two posts back in “No Time Like the Present” this will have far reaching implications for regional relations.  A China that is only a victim, repeated over and over, with every evening’s television, that it was victimized by key foreign powers, the most pernicious of whom were and are the Japanese, will continue to be a nation malnourished. 

Former Red Guard who are brave enough to publicly  and without coercion ask for forgiveness from their named victims will almost certainly approach the question of forgiveness with Japan, quite differently than someone who is only and forever simply a victim.  Clearly, there are individuals, who are simply victims or simply perpetrators and many who may be both.  But I am interested in the dialogue of civil society, the character of the nation’s discourse as a whole.  If the nation can sustain a nuanced dialogue concerning what it did to itself, then it will be much better prepared to face and resolve matters with a former perpetrator from overseas.   China has long had its “scar” literature, but that is quite different then perpetrators themselves, voluntarily speaking out about their actions.

And this is only half the dialogue.  As China makes its own steps towards shedding the shrill purity of absolute victimhood, China may be able to adjust the frame some on the legacy of the war.  But the Japanese themselves are required for a proper  dialogue.  Where are the Japanese at this particular juncture?  They have a civil society, a free press, stability, wealth . . . Japan too, must evolve in order to genuinely participate in the reconciliation it so desperately needs. We will talk more about Japan and of The Koreas role in this discussion, as we continue. 

This tension and the framing of intractable problems reminded me of a fascinating editorial by Henry Louis Gates Jr. from a few years back, concerning the slave trade, in which he explored the critical role that African kingdoms themselves played in the prolonged horror of the ‘peculiar institution.’  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

“In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.”

We could fill a library with all the differences and distinctions one could note between what it means for the President of Benin to speak to African Americans in Baltimore and what it means for China and Japan to progress towards reconciliation in North Asia.  But there is something “astonishing” about what happens and what is possible, when the framing of an intractable problem shifted.  When someone with courage offers something new.



The behavior of the former Red Guards, independently asking for forgiveness is an early marker.  A nation with sufficiently complex layers of public discourse that can allow for such discussion is evidence, I believe, of a frame shifting slightly.  Brave and hopeful souls in Japan and elsewhere should take note and look for ways capitalize on this and nudge the frame in their own land accordingly. 

A new track with a commanding crescendo.  




[1] rúhuǒrútú:  lit. white cogon flower like fire (idiom); fig. a mighty army like wildfire / daunting and vigorous (momentum) / flourishing / magnificent

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