My father was a librarian who picked up unusual books – early travellers’ tales in western Canada, explorers in Africa – many found in junk shops on Vancouver Island. Although peripheral to Canada, Vancouver Island had been promoted specifically by General Sir Ian Hamilton in The Times (London, 1935) to scores of retired British and Indian Army officers who came with all their Imperial accoutrements. My Sheraton highboy, in rough shape let it be said, was found storing paint cans on one of the outer islands; my father generously offered to cart it away in the library van. When he was a very young man he catalogued a private collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century erotica being donated to the medical library at the University of Washington. He was given, as part payment, books the university did not want, including Nuits de Paris , Travels in Manchuria and such things as birthing practices in Borneo which seems neither travel nor erotic. All these books were very interesting for someone little — my favourite had lots of small black and white photographs of hunters in jungles of leathery leaves larger than the people. All thse books, sent over the years to the rare book trade, exist now only in my 8-year old’s memory. However, the habit of looking into books was set. If they are readers, kids are indiscriminate; they read everything. In grade 7 I found in the library branch a deeply fascinating book on Japanese torture methods and probably read a Georgette Heyer next. At one time I quite liked Rumer Godden; she wrote passionate novels about 1930s Kashmir, where she lived a jodhpurs and silk shirt sort of life. One of the librarians reported to my father that Rumer Godden was unsuitable for someone my age. He quite rightly found this hilarious. The report, not Godden, but maybe both.
For an elderly bibliophile in 1950’s Tacoma with his lifetime collection of erotica – clearly a story there, one I’m not up to excavating – the recording of tattoos and scarring, medicinal practices, spiritual healing and just unimaginable ways of living were experiences that shocked the mind and tested the body. In his 1978 book Orientalism , Edward Said proposed that the European sensibility found Asia erotically sensual, steamy and cruel. The fear of the unusual must lie very close to both eroticism and violence, whether in foreign territories or, more nearby, foreign parts of one’s own body. Books, painting, appropriative music – all the arts as we still define them – are instrumental in the othering process; they fix, with often inadequate interpretation, the startling. If Travels in Manchuria is read over and over, Manchuria becomes deceptively familiar, denatured, safe, a bound book on a library shelf. To state the very obvious, books contribute to the interpretation of culture as a curiosity, peripheral, an entertainment. Core culture does not find itself curious, oddity lies in the shadows of its periphery, perceived as unstable, lawless, uncivilised. The projection of everything feared by the core onto the periphery is enacted every day at this moment of writing in early September 2020, where en masse walking black and brown people, young white people, students, mothers, healthcare workers and grandmothers, are called thugs, anarchists and rioters. This is the worst a group that considers itself at the very centre of society can project: this is what it fears. Peaceful marches, just as in the 1960s Civil Rights marches, are not made up of people who consider themselves at the centre of wealth, power and influence. But marchers know they are the medium that supports this small, vitriolic, fearful core group, and therein lies their particular power. And that is what is so interesting about peripheries and semi-peripheries. They have an immanant power, they know more about the core than the core knows about the edge. Timothy Mo’s early novels are very much about this: servants are invisible, but they see everything.
The country that never was. Do I live in this world? Seems not.
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