A Western-Centric EducationEnveloped in study during my college years, I often overlooked the narrow focus of my discipline. To me, philosophy meant the study of the question, “Why?” No matter the source of the question, philosophy dove deeper than a simple explanation. In retrospect, my program specifically dealt with analytical philosophy. As students, we dove into philosophy from a deductive approach, setting aside much of European existentialism and Eastern philosophy. While it may have seemed those angles were less worthwhile, we just didn’t focus on them. Understanding the narrow focus of my studies, I find the philosophical tension in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel, Ambiguous Adventure intriguing. The Studies of Samba Diallo The story follows a young, Senegalese boy, Samba Diallo—a devout Muslim born and raised in the Diallobé country of Senegal. While in his homeland, Samba Diallo learns the culture, tradition, and faith of his people. At the behest of the Diallobé milieu, Samba attends college in Paris studying philosophy. For Samba—ever the excellent student—this opportunity allows him a chance to continue learning. For the Diallobé community, Samba’s encounter with the Western world will provide answers about the current political pressures the community encounters from all sides. “The men of the Diallobé wanted to learn ‘how better to join wood to wood.’ The mass of the country had made the reverse choice to that of the teacher. While the latter was setting at naught the stiffness of his joints, the pressure on his loins, setting his cabin at naught, and recognizing the reality only of Him toward Whom his thought mounted with delight at every instant, the people of the Diallobé were each day a little more anxious about the stability of their dwellings, the unhealthy state of their bodies. The Diallobé wanted more substance” (29).Tensions between Past and Present Yet, Samba’s studies carry consequences. The more he learns of the Western world, the less he associates himself with his Muslim faith and his cultural tradition. While never outright disowning his past, he finds the tension between past and present difficult to maintain.“The West is in process of overturning these simple ideas, of which we are part and parcel. They began, timidly, by relegating God to a place ‘between inverted commas.’ Then two centuries later, having acquired more assurance, they decreed, ‘God is dead.’ From that day dates the era of frenzied toil. Nietzsche is the contemporary of the industrial revolution. God was no longer there to measure and justify man’s activity. Was it not industry that did that? Industry was blind, although, finally, it was still possible to domicile all the good it produced… But already this phase is past… After the death of God, what they are now announcing is the death of man” (91).In the end, the more Samba learns, the more he realizes life is ambiguous. Pondering the Value of Broad-Ranging Study These conclusions resonate with my experience as a former philosophy student. Much like Samba, my philosophical studies carried an immensely Western influence. Whether intentional or unintentional, the program implies an inconsequential view of non-Western worldviews.Even though I greatly appreciate my education and credit it for sharpening my critical reasoning skills, I feel unbalanced. For this reason, I find immense value in reading non-Western views and rebalancing the way I comprehend the world. Ambiguous Adventure is a short-but-dense philosophical read. It doesn’t offer a fast moving plot, but its thought-provoking motifs offer much for a curious reader. If you are interested in non-Western views on life, check out Ambiguous Adventure. Originally published at http://www.wherepenmeetspaper.com
Methodical, ruminative coming-of-age tract played out against the backdrop of the developing world and its colonial counterparts. Kane looks at the way that colonized Africa has managed to wager its soul in the ongoing conflicts with the West, told here by a young Islamic scholar.Standard culture-clash, but really heartfelt and ready to delve into the most vulnerable areas of the dilemma. A couple of different frames are being placed around the simple narrative ---promising village boy deemed equal to an education in the West, goes abroad, risks everything in the encounter-- as Kane attempts to fit the young man into a broader context. The African side of the story, framed by Islam, is presented as visceral, immediate, and profoundly spiritual. In this frame each character is a semi-mythic persona, comprising a commedia dell'arte group of types, who dispense one sort of wisdom or another: we have the Knight, the Royal Lady, the Teacher, the Fool, etc. One of the most predominant ongoing frames is that of Philosophy, and indeed it is that which the protagonist will study when sent to France. Complicating the evolving observations, the deep cultural divide, and the general uproar of Youth is the presence, in study form, at least, of voices like Pascal, Descartes, Nietzsche and others from the Western canon. (And who go a long way toward creating havoc in the Faith-versus-Reason column, as if our hero hadn't got enough to absorb...) In the end, an incredibly wide-ranging set of themes to pull together, and in this translation, at least, no such thing ever happens. This should have been some troubling mash-up of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Camus' The Stranger and The Catcher In The Rye but --it wasn't to be. (For me, I loved the title, first and foremost. And the truth is, I imagined some kind of French-Senegalese co-production, crisply photographed in black & white, and dating from the nouvelle vague years. Instead, back to fucking René Descartes, the man who, in the course of a paragraph, a sentence, even, launched a million undergraduate naps ...)All isn't lost, though. The prose has a calm, righteous density that slows down the conclusion-jumping modern reader, and a quality and tempo that invites reflection ... These aren't trivial matters. This is a boy who is nearly a man, a believer who is nearly an apostate, and an exile who goes abroad only to find conflict with himself : " .. I am not a distinct country of the Diallobe facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it, and what I must leave with it, by way of counter-balance. I have become the two. There is not a clear mind deciding between the two factors of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress over not being two.”
What do You think about Ambiguous Adventure (1972)?
لا أدري إنتهيت منها دون أن أفهم نهايتها تماما .. غامضة حقا .. الشخصيات فيها متداخلة جدا وأحيانا لا تعرف من المتكلم ! .. أعجبتني بعض الأجزاء منها و أعجبني الشيخ جدا ... قلة جدا من هم بذاك الذهد ... مقتطفات أعجبتني : _ هل يمكن أن تقوم حضارة و تنهض في غيبة الإنسان أو في حالة عدم توازنه ؟_إن الحضارة معمار من أجوبة ، فروعتها ، ككل مسكن ، تقاس بالنسبة إى مدى ما توفره من الراحة التي يجدها الإنسان فيها . _أتعطي الله كل ما يستحقه من أفكارك وأفعالك ؟_ليس المطلوب مبايعته مرة واحدة أن تنطق بالشهادة الكبرى نظريا وكفى ، إنما المطلوب هو أن تجتهد في مواؤمة كل خلجة من أفكارك بما تعقله من منهجه ، أتفعل ؟ _لا أعرف ما أعتقد لكن حجم مساحة ما أجهله من الضخامة و الرحابة ، بحيث لا مندوحة لي من الاعتقاد .
—هدير
This story has been told before and will, I have no doubt, be told again. It is an old story, the oldest some would say. I was not brought up a Muslim but I do understand fundamentalism and I doubt this book will do much to encourage anyone to take an interest in religion. The opening chapter is particularly upsetting, seeing a young boy tortured—there’s no other word for it—simply to ensure that he can recite a holy text by rote (and without understanding) without error. A part of me considered quitting the book very early on. But I persisted and thankfully we moved away from the classroom and onto bigger issues, whether or not to send children to religious teachers like this one or to, instead, allow them to attend the new schools which have been established by the country’s recent conquerors. A cousin of the boy takes the bull by the horn since the men seem to be dithering and makes a decision:“I have an elderly cousin,” he said, “in whose mind reality never loses its just claims. She has not yet emerged from the astonishment into which the defeat and colonization of the Diallobé plunged her. They call her the Most Royal Lady. I should have not gone to the foreign school, and I should not be here this evening, if it had not been for her desire to find an explanation for our defeat. The day I went to take leave of her she said to me again, ‘Go find out, among them, how one can conquer without being in the right.’ ” So the boy is enrolled in the foreign school and eventually leaves for France to take a degree in philosophy but before he’s completed his studies his father recalls him having decided he was wrong to let him go. Still the damage has been done. Despite having tried to be a good Muslim he returns home a changed man where he has to face his old teacher or at least his proxy, “the fool”, a man not unlike the boy (well, a young man by now) who had also travelled to the West but one who has seen the error of his ways and become something of a zealot. Needless to say they butt heads. The mindset here is very much one of either/or. There is no middle ground. The message is a simple one: that what the West has to offer costs too much, not in material terms but in spiritual ones. "Is what one learns worth what one forgets?" wonders our protagonist when in France. It’s a good question. But why can’t we have both, the best of both? Setting aside the religious aspect of the book we are also faced here with the whole issue of colonisation and how it corrupts (and frequently destroys) important cultures. It’s a good portrait of the “double consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about in his book, The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”On the whole I wasn’t that fond of the style of writing in this book. I found it a little stiff and at times slow—the whole palaver about the French schools just dragged on I felt—but most of the exchanges were interested and I thought the ending was inspired although I can see why some didn’t care for it.
—Jim
African (victim) perspective on colonialism. A depressing book. The protagonist struggles to preserve his dying native African heritage, in the face of an allegedly soulless French culturo-economic milieu, which he finds disenchanting, but can't escape. I can buy into that premise.The book states contrary to what "people have wanted us to believe", Germans are not more racist by nature than any other European settlers.In the epiloque a post-life experience is depicted, resembling, actually, the episode in Wilder's our "Our Town" play, which imagined dead people as continuing to experience life, but on a different plane. I can take it both ways: either as a literal expression of faith, or as a symbolic statement saying "Look! The dead have something to say to us."
—John
