Opinion/Reflection: On Pygmalion, Gender and Emotional Labour

After weeks of particularly bad chronic pain, I turned to one of my all-time favourite comfort movies, My Fair Lady. However, as much as I love it, I am also very aware that the Pygmalion story is part of deeply embedded sexist societal discourses that seek to control and mould women and their behaviour so that they are desirable to men, both sexually, and as people to be around.

For all that Henry asks Eliza to marry him, their relationship is extremely ambiguous, and I've always wondered if he actually has any romantic interest in her, or if he simply wants to secure her emotional labour. Because women's emotional labour is one of the key things behind these discourses: when a random man tells a woman to smile, what he is actually saying is that she must appear happy and at ease so as not to discomfort him, regardless of what she is actually feeling or her right to bodily autonomy. The most important or salient thing about a woman is how she appears to a man, as Henry so astutely realises: 

So, Eliza must not only do the work of transforming herself into a 'lady', but also take on large amounts of emotional labour for Henry, which goes unrecognised, and this is why Henry is so desperate to get her back when she 'runs away'. He doesn't know where anything is, and nothing is running 'as it should'. It is irrelevant that she occasionally objects to taking on this role, because it doesn't change the latent expectation that she will, and the ending - where she returns and all Henry says is "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?" - implies that she accepts it as necessity. 

There is also the implication that she should be grateful to do this emotional labour, and grateful for her transformation in general, because it represents 'betterment'. In a situation familiar to many a corporate woman, it is Eliza who does all the work, and Henry who gets all the credit. Nobody acknowledges her achievements, or recognises the legitimacy of her anxiety about her future, to the point that she discusses her own death as a means of escape, which is dismissed merely as female hysteria. However, the film does also show sympathy for Eliza's plight, contrasting Pickering and Higgins' casual misogyny and self-congratulation with Higgins' mother, who understands Eliza's grievances and concerns perfectly. But this still perpetuates a gender divide: women are emotionally intelligent, while men are not. This is the very social stereotype that causes women to have to take on emotional labour in the first place.

Naturally, My Fair Lady takes it's cues from its source material, George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. Despite the fact that Pygmalion was subtitled 'A Romance', Shaw was apparently horrified at the way stage productions, audiences and critics interpreted and amplified a romantic subtext between Eliza and Henry, and wished the emphasis to remain on his satirisation of the themes of class, independence and transformation. To the modern audience, all of these themes evoke Eliza more than Henry, but Henry's independence as a bachelor was also important to Shaw (McGovern 2011). In order to get rid of "any suggestion that the middle-aged bully and the girl of eighteen are lovers" (Berst p. 22, cited in Ross 2000), Shaw added a footnote to the play, in which he elucidated the fate of the characters after the curtain closed (Eliza marries her beau Freddy and opens a shop, all the while remaining friends with Higgins). The post-script also contains much long-winded philosophising, and is an oddd mix of proto-feminism and misogyny, awareness of class and classism. (According to his Wikipedia page, Shaw was a man of many contradicting opinions, including racial equality and intermarriage and eugenics). Shaw writes of Eliza: 

Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.

He's working his way up to saying that it should be obvious to the audience, especially women, that Eliza chooses Freddy. After all, he loves her, and is not likely to dominate, bully or beat her. What more can a gal ask for? 

I know very little about Shaw himself, but it strikes me that if he had lived today, he would have been a massive mansplainer, who thinks his work is the best thing since sliced bread, but bad-mouths everything else in the same genre, or using the same archetypes and tropes. Although the name Pygmalion refers to a myth where a sculptor falls in love with his creation and Shaw subtitled the bloody thing 'A Romance', when he wrote this clarifying footnote, he shits massively on romance: 

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of "happy endings" to misfit all stories

He then works up to the inevitable stereotypes that we still see about romance readers and people who value a good HEA: 

[Higgins is] a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural.

When I read that, I'm kind of happy that the romance between Eliza and Henry was drawn out against his will, despite my discomfort with it. It's a beautiful comeuppance to someone so holier-than-thou, not to mention the weird Oedipus complex thing going on. 

But Shaw is long dead, an it's his rendering of the Pygmalion myth that remains. There are numerous films, TV shows and books that have put their own slant Shaw's work, from the original 1935 German film adaption to the 1956 original Broadway production of My Fair Lady and modern adaptations like She's All That and Selfie. There's a post of the top 10 at Heroes and Heartbreakers. 

Many of the contemporary adaptations have feminist leanings, such as Jeannie Lin's My Fair Concubine, which I reviewed recently and absolutely loved. While these make explicit the fact that pre-transformation Eliza is worthy in her own right, the narrative structure still means that the hero will only discover this once he has forced her to undergo the transformation, which sometimes annoys me because it's so emblematic: men want women to change for them, and then women have to do more emotional labour when men don't like the results they asked for. 

No matter how feminist, I think that a Pygmalion tale with a female Eliza and a male Henry will also contain perturbing implications about the social control of the female person. Perhaps the only way to get rid of these is to gender-swap the roles (please someone write me some gender-swapped Pygmalion romance that are less problematic than Judith Ivory's The Proposition) or to make it into a M/M or F/F, like K J Charles' A Fashionable Indulgence. Charles' work shows that the romance between a Pygmalion and his Galatea does not have to, in any way, detract from the original and central themes of class, independence and transformation. In fact, they augment each other beautifully. Shaw was cremated, but if he'd been buried, I'm sure he'd be turning in his grave at that, the old, anti-romance bigot. 

Opinion: An Open Letter to a Bookish Charity

Dear [REDACTED],

I discovered you in my quest to find new homes for some of my books, and thought highly of your mission to distribute book to people on the streets across Australia. At first, it seemed we would be a perfect fit. You only wanted books in good condition; I already had a 'to go back to the Salvation Army store' pile and a 'good quality' pile, so I'd give the quality stuff to you. Except that, on further research, I realised you wouldn't want them, because, while my pile has historical fiction, non-fiction and speculative fiction, it also contains many romance and chick-lit novels. GASP!

I know that this is not going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because "out of respect for your customers", you do not accept romance and chick-lit, or other inappropriate and pernicious influences such as religious materials and guides to getting rich quick and/or losing 10 kilos in 10 days.

Perhaps you fear that, if you did accept romance novels, you'd be swamped with tattered Mills & Boons and old school romances with dubious covers and even more dubious expressions of consent. Except that you have already stated that books must be in "near new condition", so anyone who did so would be showing a blatant disregard for your guidelines and the work you do.

Therefore, I can only assume you have made a moral judgement on the content of romance novels, in general but in specific as to their suitability for people who are homeless. It can't be that, despite greater visibility of men sleeping rough, you are unaware of the large numbers of women who are homeless. There were 45,813 women who were homeless on census night in 2011, which accounted for 44% of the total number of people experiencing homelessness. I cannot believe that, with the removal of government funding from domestic violence and homelessness services over the intervening years, that things are any better now.

Speaking of domestic violence, 55% of women state this is the primary reason they have presented to homelessness services, and I suspect this is where your reasoning for banning romance lies, given that you have also disallowed true crime books, and books that deal with drugs, depression and suicide.

And, of course, there are undoubtedly women who, after experiencing intimate partner violence, do not want to read books that centre relationships, some instances and sub-genres of which may normalise controlling or other problematic behaviours. But I also know many readers in the online community who have experienced domestic and/or sexual violence, and who read romance and chick-lit for exactly this reason. As romance author and scholar Maya Rodale said:

Unlike any other literature, romance novels champion women who defy expectations, they validate their interests and experiences, they declare women deserve love, respect and pleasure, and they reward them for refusing to settle for second best. 

They are escapist and provide a guarantee that everything is going to be okay, which can provide comfort in a world that offers no such assurances, especially to women.

Thus far, I've spoken exclusively about women, but statistics from America show that only between 82-84% of romance novels are bought by women, so perhaps your male clients would also appreciate the choice of a few romance novels now and again.

I can only assume that you think that romance is trashy, anti-feminist, not what your clients want, and potentially detrimental to their wellbeing. I don't even know what to say about the exclusion of chick-lit, because I'm finding it hard to see any objection there but undisguised literary snobbery. It's true that there may be sub-genres, tropes and themes that might not be the most suitable, but this is also true of literary and other genre fiction, all of which you accept without caveats.

If you get in contact, I would be happy to help sort through/read any romance novel donations and pull out ones that contain anything that might be triggering, and I'm sure there would be other people willing to do the same in other cities, including some of your current workers and patrons. Maybe that's not the best answer - I don't know - but surely it's better than completely removing choice and agency from your clients, as you are currently. After all, the entire purpose of your organisation is to counter the dehumanisation that can occur when people sleep rough, and yet you are treating your clients in a paternalistic and infantilizing manner. Unless you have asked your customers if they would like to read romance and chick-lit, and the vast majority said no, in which case I apologise. But somehow I suspect you haven't.

I still greatly admire the work of your organisation, and, although I can't make a donation without spending a sizable amount of time re-sorting my books, I'll send my serious literature friends your way.

Sincerely,
Dani

P.S. You'll never see this, of course, and I'll never be brave enough to send it to you, so...I guess we'll never know what could have been. Keep up the otherwise good work.

Opinion/Reflection: Australia's Erasure of Its Indigenous History

Australia's having another flash-in-the-pan moment where it has the choice to face up to its institutionalised erasure of Indigenous Australians in our history, or keep its head in the sand. Unsurprisingly, we've chosen the latter.

This time, the spark was a Daily Terror article manufacturing outrage over the fact that UNSW encourages the use of the word 'invasion' over 'discovery' when talking about British occupation. The whole thing has gone down much the same way it always does, and I don't have anything to say about it that an Indigenous voice hasn't said better; Luke Pearson's What Was 200 Years Ago? is particularly powerful.

However, something else that has caught my eye this week, as we've been dealing with this, is two remarkably similar stories of Indigenous archaeological finds on government building sites. One is in Sydney, where I live, and the other in New Zealand's Waikato region, where my family are from.

While building Sydney's much-anticipated lightrail, workers and heritage experts have uncovered a site with 22,000 Aboriginal artefacts, and the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an Indigenous heritage group is having to apply for an urgent stop work order. Transport for NSW claimed that the archaeological site was less than one percent of the whole site, and that workers could still work around it, but representatives from the heritage group said that the cache was the most easily identifiable part of a larger site, and that the whole area needed to be surveyed. The finds have significance for our understanding of inter-tribal trade and interaction, and according to an elder in the ABC article cited below, half of the site has already been destroyed. Transport's NSW statement is as follows:

All work that has occurred on the site since the artefacts were found has been in consultation with all Aboriginal groups...Transport for NSW and ALTRAC Light Rail are investigating, in conjunction with the Aboriginal representatives, opportunities to recognise the items found on site, for example in displays or education programs. The social value of the site to the local Aboriginal community is very high and we are continuing to work with [the Aboriginal groups] to identify the artefacts and how they came to be found in Randwick. - ABC News, Indigenous atrefacts found at Sydney light rail construction site, calls to halt work

Compare that response with what happened when a pre-European skull was found while digging a culvert for the New Zealand's new Waikato expressway. For a start, a stop work order was given immediately, and workers were transferred to sites up and down the expressway, away from the site. The press release from the New Zealand Transport Agency describes their process, and I've added some annotations for non-New Zealanders:

The Transport Agency's Hamilton highway manager Kaye Clark said project protocols which the NZ Transport Agency has developed alongside Waikato-Tainui immediately came into play when the remains were uncovered.   

“Our protocols include provisions for kaitiaki (guardian) from iwi [tribes] to work on site, as needed, to monitor earthworks as they unfold. This discovery was made by the kaitiaki and the project archaeologists working alongside each other, which is exactly what should happen,” Mrs Clark says.

The area was blessed by Waikato-Tainui [the local tribe] this morning (March 30) and work has stopped in that area while archaeologists remove the remains and carry out investigations in the surrounding area. 

Mrs Clark says where possible the Transport Agency worked hard to align new highways away from any sites of significance. 

“Working with iwi and the local communities we try to identify all areas of significance before we embark on our projects. Where that is not possible archaeological investigations are undertaken at the start of any project to collect and record any history so we can make it available for all New Zealanders,” Mrs Clark says. 

“In situations like this, we also have protocols we have developed alongside iwi to ensure correct cultural processes are followed.” 

Waikato Tainui, Te Arataura Chairman Rahui Papa said the co-designed process which led to the protocols being developed makes for an easier transition to ensure the correct cultural practice is engaged. 

“The NZ Transport Agency and Waikato-Tainui will continue to work in partnership to satisfy cultural values and to complete the journey that we embarked on together,” Mr Papa says. 

Once the koiwi has been removed, examined and the site investigation are complete the koiwi [remains] will be reinterred at Taupiri Urupa by kaumatua [elders].

Are you seeing a difference? Because I certainly am. One's on the defensive, and one's proactive. Also, one's a statement that was only made after the media picked up on the issue, and the other was a standard press release created to any inform interested parties about what had occurred. That's not to say that New Zealand is some kind of utopia - they still have the same legacy as any other settler society - but when it comes to tangibly respecting their Indigenous heritage, they're light years ahead of Australia.

You can be assured there are no public servants in NSW making statements about working hard "to align new highways away from any sites of significance". We don't even recognise that Indigenous Australians have sites of significance.

In 2014, there was a backlash when then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott said that the British arrived to "nothing but bush", but essentially our society functions on this premise. It's why there's mass outrage when we're told that 'discovery' is not an acceptable term, why Indigenous heritage groups have to campaign for something that should be automatic. In another depressing incident from the last week, it's why Tony Abbott was able to publish a Quarterly essay in which one of the opening lines was "we [Australia] lack a colonial past to complicate the present", and nobody really batted an eyelid. 

Opinion: Race, Gender and the Cologne New Year's Eve Attacks

When I decided to take a white-saviour volunteer position as a boarding mistress and teacher in an Indian school at the grand old age of eighteen, I experienced a variety of reactions from family, friends and complete strangers. However, two months before I left, when the Delhi gang rape and subsequent protests hit headlines across the world, that all changed. The nigh universal response became: “Have you really thought this through? Do you really want to be a single woman on your own in India?” The company that had facilitated my placement even sent a carefully-worded email essentially offering me the chance to renege. The collective anxiety was contagious, and I started to wonder if they were right.

The internet, however, was quick reassure me: the stats that were being quoted were not indicative of the ‘rape crisis’ the media were reporting, but of more women (and men) feeling they were able to report sexual assault. In fact, the widespread sense of outrage made it seem like it might be safer to go to India now than in any time in recent history. People’s blindfolds had come off, and they weren’t willing to be passive about the problem any longer.

Today, we are seeing a similar sense of outrage over the mass sexual assaults that occurred on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, but whereas Indian society stared into its soul and came away with conclusions about the way it treats women, Germany is coming to conclusions about race and immigration. It’s hardly surprising that the attacks – with their North African and Arab suspects – have become a flashpoint for these issues, given that their multi-kulti policies and openness towards asylum-seekers have been causing spiralling angst and concern about retaining German culture (Heimatkultur) in the face of unprecedented immigration.

However, the focus on race detaches the Cologne attacks from what they actually were: sexual assault against women. Instead of recognising that we still have problems with the way women are treated in supposedly egalitarian Western countries, it becomes a matter of us and them: they treat women like this, but we do not. It’s a national exercise in cognitive dissonance that prevents any awareness of institutionalised sexism and violence against women, and reduces blame to individuals of other races.

But, if it’s them and not us, then why is does my office building have codes on the doors to the women’s bathrooms, but not the men’s? Why do my male friends have to step in to deter unwelcome advances after my own refusals are ignored? Why is it standard practice for women text each other after a night out to confirm they’ve all got home safely and without incident?

If it can’t possibly be us, then why were the police so vastly unhelpful and dismissive that night, apparently telling one woman who had been stripped of her clothes and underwear to “keep a good grip on your champagne bottle to use as a weapon”? Why did an initial report filed by the police in Cologne record a “mostly peaceful New Year’s Eve” that was “relaxed” in atmosphere?

The answer to all those questions is that, as Western countries, we are still far from perfect at ensuring that women are treated as worthy of respect, and violence against them – whether sexual or otherwise – is taken as seriously as other crimes. At the end of the day, whether the attacks in Cologne were perpetrated by them is irrelevant, because they’re definitely a result of us and the way we see women. 

Opinion: The Goodes Saga and Anti-Indigenous Racism in Australia

In the past few years, much ink and many more bytes of data have been spent discussing Adam Goodes. For those outside Australia or those who can't quite remember how exactly we got to where we are today, Goodes is an Indigenous Australian player of Aussie Rules football. While playing a game in 2013, a young girl - only 12 or 13 years old - yelled out "ape" at Goodes as he ran past. It was not the first time such a slur had been directed at Goodes on the field, but that day he alerted security, and the girl was ejected from the game.

It was a small thing in of itself, but it acted as a massive catalyst. The next year, Goodes was recognised as Australian of the Year for his "elite place in AFL history" and for being a "great role model and advocate for the fight against racism" (NADC 2014). He was featured in a prominent awareness campaign run by the Australian Human Rights Commission, including the below video:

Throughout the 2014 and 2015 AFL seasons, Goodes was booed loudly when he ran onto the field, or whenever he had the ball. This precipitated a massive national debate about whether or not the booing was racially motivated. Many people, the booers amongst them, said that it was just because Goodes was playing for the opposite team, and that really, in a way, it was a compliment. They booed because he was such a good player. Others admitted that - in a roundabout way - they booed Goodes because of his race: by speaking out against racism, he was being divisive, and there was no place for people who tried to stir trouble. There were messages of support as well of course, but they were drowned out amidst the vitriol. Goodes took leave from playing, and later announced his retirement from professional football.

But this week, he was thrust into the spotlight - and the national debate - again, when department store David Jones announced Goodes as one of their brand ambassadors. Their Facebook page was quickly overrun by racist posts and declarations from people saying they'd never step in David Jones again. Once more, there were messages of support, and through counter-mobilisation and Facebook's curation systems, these ended up being the more dominant of the two.

But the question remains, what exactly is Australia's problem with Adam Goodes? We call it racism - and it is racist - but it's not that quite simple. From 2011 onward, Indigenous model Samantha Harris was a David Jones ambassador, and no-one said a peep. But Adam Goodes has become a flashpoint, a litmus test of Australian society's pretensions and self-delusions, our ideas of what we are, and what we are not.

In this massive, bubbling pot of ill-will aimed toward Goodes, racism is only one ingredient. It's mixed in with ethnocentrism, nationalism and Tall Poppy Syndrome. An inherent part of the Australian psyche, Tall Poppy Syndrome is where those who have succeeded in their field or "get big heads" are forcibly humbled or 'cut down' by a begrudging public. Another analogy that is used is the crab mentality, based on the observation that, if one crab attempts to climb the wall of the bucket in which it is confined, its compatriots will drag it back down. However, all crabs are not dragged back down with equal force. There's an undeniable aspect of "knowing your place" that makes attacks against non-white Australians - particularly Indigenous Australians - extra vicious.

So, it's not necessarily Goodes' indigeneity that offends people, it's that he's Indigenous and proud; Indigenous and taking a stand against racism; Indigenous and, ultimately, not playing by society's tacit rule of turning the other cheek. Because it's mostly okay to be an Indigenous tall poppy. So long as you are apolitical and don't make a point of being Indigenous, everything is hunky dory. Australia at large will only acknowledge your ethnicity on its terms, when it wants to hold you up as an example for feel-good moments like this year's rugby league grand final. You'll used by the Patriot brigade to show that look, they are not racist, they don't have anything against Jonathan Thurston, Deborah Mailman or whomever.

But as soon as you become a poppy that is swaying independently of the winds of society, the status quo is upset and everything changes. Society's blindfold is ripped away, and we are forced to look at our own ugly reflection in the mirror. We don't provide a fair go for all, and we are not a shining beacon of multicultural success. And that's when the claws come out, when people's perception of themselves, and the world they live in, is threatened. That's why we have this segue so common it's almost a cliche: "I'm not racist, but...". People are reaffirming their identity, their place in the world, before they launch into an attack on those who threaten it. And no-one is more threatening than Adam Goodes, who reminds Australia that he is not just Australian by miming an Indigenous war dance or refusing to take racist taunts lying down.

We saw the same phenomenon last week, when Indigenous actress Miranda Tapsell, stated on television that, because of the racism she has endured, she "did not identify as Australian". The online response was a textbook case of what I have been describing, with many comments in the vein of this one:

What a divisive, inflammatory show and a hateful, one-sided woman. Address the venom that comes out of "her people's" mouths....Cry me a river...not listening to sooks with thin skin...Broken record, victim, victim.

I couldn't help but from altering spelling and grammatical errors as I came across them, but you still get the picture. The insult of "sook" - meaning a cry-baby or weak, overly emotional person - is a favoured tool to pull Indigenous non-conformers back down the bucket walls and into the mire. The idea is that all the wrongs done to Indigenous Australians are in the past, and "they" should "get over it". As a concept, it is entirely based on the national self-delusion of equal treatment and equal opportunity I have discussed above. It's ironic, given Australia still commemorates the myth of the brave and egalitarian ANZACs one hundred years later. For one, it's "lest we forget", and for the other, it's "you sook, why are you flogging a dead horse?".

By retiring and stepping mainly out of the public limelight, Goodes has refused to be the escapee crab. He's tried to remove himself from the bucket that is the Australian public sphere. Unfortunately, it's followed him to a position at David Jones that has hitherto been so unremarkable it barely receives an inch or two in the business or fashion sections of the newspaper.

The break up between Goodes and the Australian public has been as acrimonious as the rest of their relationship. But, hopefully, one day, Australia will be grown up enough to say "It's not you, it's me", and Goodes will be able to rescind the metaphorical AVO he's taken out on us all. In the meantime, there's always another crab. Australia will turn to ripping them down, and Goodes will be all but forgotten.

Non-Fiction Review/Reflection: Western Imperialism and Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley

If you are wondering why I haven't posted much in the last month, it's because I've been on holiday in Vietnam and Cambodia. It's prompted some thinking about the way I've seen Cambodia represented, and how this reflects on our society more then it does on theirs.  

Cambodia is not a country that sits high in the West's consciousness; it conjures up little more than images of Angkor Wat and a vague yet still horrifying knowledge of the Khmer Rouge years. It is also on our radar, at least in Australia, as a destination for backpackers and voluntourists. Visiting orphanages while travelling Cambodia has become highly popular, spawning a backlash from governments, NGOs and the media who are concerned about the booming industry of fake orphanages which separate children from their parents and institutionalise them for the benefit of Western visitors. UNICEF estimates that only one in every five children in Cambodian 'orphanages' is actually parentless. While in Cambodia, I came across these UNICEF-branded ads often - in restaurants, fair trade shops, even on the backs of toilet doors:

If I had not read Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joel Brinkley prior to entering Cambodia, the significance of many little things, such as these posters, would have passed me by. I can't rate Cambodia's Curse as a book; as a romance reader who likes feel-good reads, I have no way to judge it or even articulate my feelings that well. It's interesting and disturbing on a lot of different levels, first and foremost in the content it discusses but also in a more subtle way, in the way it reveals the ongoing legacy of centuries of colonialism and Western cultural imperialism.

For example, in the introduction Brinkley declares "Cambodia is the only place where the bulk of the nation, more than three-quarters of its people, still lives more or less as they did 1,000 years ago", citing both elements of Khmer culture, which I will discuss later, and a lack of 'modern' infrastructure as his evidence for this statement. However, I would posit that any claim that a culture or nation is static should be taken with a grain of salt. By their very definition, cultures are dynamic things, constantly undergoing processes of change, growth and reconciliation with outside beliefs and practices. The idea of non-Western cultures as timeless is a pervasive one, and although we have discursively seperated it from its roots, it still has the power to breed race hierarchies and binaries. 

At times it seemed as though Brinkley's entire thesis was built solely around this latent cultural imperialism. His key point is that Cambodia is inherently susceptible to corruption and other societal ills, which he sees as the natural progression of the age-old system of patronage described below: 

Unequal exchanges between the wealthy and powerful and the poorer and dependent are referred to as patron-client relationships. Both sides provide goods and services to the other. The patron possesses superior power and influence and uses them to assist his clients. The clients in return provide smaller services and loyalty over an extended period of time. The relationship is complementary, with both sides benefiting. The client is protected and assured a minimum level of subsistence. The patron in turn has followers, who serve to increase his power....For Khmer, as for Thais, the norm of reciprocity, the moral underpinnings of the system, are found in Buddhist notions of merit, karma and dharma. A leader is born into his advantageous position because of meritorious action in previous lives, this is his karma. This leader should then fulfill his dharma, or prescribed duty as a person of this status, by acting as a generous and righteous leader. He therefore redistributes goods and provides protection to those in his care. -  J. Ledgerwood, 'Understanding Cambodia: Social Hierarchy, Patron-Client Relationships and Power'

Brinkley contends that, when these relationships are transposed on to the present day, they breed corruption and widen the divide between rich and poor as patrons take more and more, and return less and less benefits to their clients. At first, it seems a fairly sound judgement, but when combined with the aforementioned idea of a changeless culture, it leads to conclusions that I feel are misguided and which play down the role the outside world - particularly the West - has exerted on Cambodia.  

Brinkley introduces the reader to his thesis about patronage with another sweeping statement: "far more than almost any other state, modern Cambodia is a product of customs and practices set in stone a millenium ago" (loc. 420). To him, the Khmer tradition of patronage has made the Cambodian people passive and apathetic, unable or unwilling to help themselves. This is a puzzling conclusion. If the Cambodian people shy away from upsetting the status quo, surely one cannot underestimate the way foreign powers and their ideologies have continually buffeted the nation around throughout the 20th century. 

Shortly after the end of the French colonial occupation, Cambodia came to the attention of the West as an adjunct to the Vietnam War, when it was suspected that the Viet Cong were moving supplies over the border. The USA and her allies dropped 2,756,941 tons of bombs on Cambodia during the Vietnam War - more than all the combined Allies dropped in World War II - and supported an erractic would-be dictator. In consequence, Cambodians fled to the forests and joined the emerging Khmer Rouge, as the deposed king urged them to do. The Chinese also provided military and financial support against the American-backed regime. 

When the Khmer Rouge began to seize control of rural areas and refugees began to bring horrible stories over the borders, the US was convinced, in that black-and-white way of Cold War thinking, that it was offshoots of the Vietnamese communists who were responsible. However, even if the refugees had been believed, there is nothing to say that intervention would have been more forthcoming; 1976 was an election year in the US, and, after the Fall of Saigon, the Western nations wouldn't have touched South East Asia with a barge pole. The Iran Hostage Crisis commandeered the world's attention, and when Vietnam could no longer countenance the masses of people fleeing, they invaded and deposed the Khmer Rouge, installing a government largely constituted of former Khmer Rouge commanders who had seen the way the wind was blowing and defected. Given the choice between awarding Cambodia's seat in the General Assembly to Vietnamese puppets or the Khmer Rouge, the UN - guided by the US - chose the Khmer Rouge, relegitimising them and helping them retain de facto control over large swaths of the country. 

When civil war broke out, the US, Vietnam, China and the USSR all armed different factions in the power struggle. After blithely ignoring the Khmer Rouge years and subsequent decades of unrest, the UN finally sat up and took notice in the 1990s, buoyed by a new faith in people-power after the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Bloc. They formed a special body, UNTAC, and threw $1.6 billion at the 'problem' that was Cambodia in the most ambitious state-building program since post-WWII Germany. Then, after only eighteen months and while a coalition government was still being formed, UNTAC was downsized and then dismantled, the UN chastened by its failure to prevent genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Do not get me wrong, Brinkley covers all of what I have laid out above, and there are many more instances of foreign intervention in Cambodian affairs littered throughout his book, but he constantly comes back to this idea that Khmer culture itself is responsible for the situation in which the nation finds itself. It's a conclusion that, to me, doesn't hold up under examination.  

Ultimately fatalistic about the country's chances of betterment, Brinkley quotes many aid workers and foreign officials who lament that progress is not being made. They all say it is the fault of the government, and bemoan the Cambodian people for not being suitably outraged to affect change. An ex-US ambassador, also quoted by Brinkley, used 
to warn colleauges to "be careful, because Cambodia is the most dangerous place you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it, and eventually it will break your heart". Looking back over quotes such as these in the writing of this piece, I was put in mind of a verse by Kipling, the poster child of imperialism, that was included in an English textbook I taught out of in India:

Take up the White Man's burden 

The savage wars of peace-

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hopes to nought. 

                        — The White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling

The analogy might seem a bit extreme at first, but if you take out the first line and the reference to heathens - the two elements at which people are most likely to recoil - the sentiment is remarkably similar to that of Brinkley and his interviewees. And I am not alone in my assessment of the book; one reviewer on Goodreads says that he seems "replused by everything he is reporting", utilising "colonial overtones". Even Joel Whitney, writing for the New York Times says: 

...given Washington's role today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, it might have been braver if he [Brinkley] had chosen to hold Americans, and not just Cambodians, accountable for the suffering he so movingly describes.

And therein is the essensce of my problem with Cambodia's Curse. It's not necessarily that Brinkley puts forward a thesis with which I disagree, but the way this contributes to hegemonic discourses about 'the West and the rest' that continue to dominate foreign relations between nations and determine their place in the global community. 

But to give credit where credit is due, Brinkley's book has a truly astounding collection of statistics, and I've included some below as a final aside to give some context on the situation in Cambodia, to which I have unspecifically referred throughout this piece: 

• In 2009, Cambodia's average per capita income was between 500-600 USD, while a third of all Cambodians lived on less than 1 US dollar a day (Cambodian Human Rights and Development Assosciation, cited loc. 4949) 
• 42% of all children suffer from stunting, while the national average life expectancy is only 61. (Cambodian Human Rights and Development Assosciation, cited loc. 4949) 
• Only 20% of all rural Cambodians have access to toilets or clean water (Cambodian Human Rights and Development Assosciation, cited loc. 4949) 
• Again of 2009, 1 of every 185 pregnant women died in childbirth (UN, cited loc. 4080), and 1 child in 10 died before the age of five (unreferenced source, cited loc. 3011)
• Around 1.5 million Cambodians are food insecure, unable to get enough food to supply 2000 calories a day (World Food Program in Cambodia, cited loc. 3355).  However, as of 2009, the nation produced an rice surplus of 2.5 million tons, which the government sold to Vietnam, Thailand and others (unreferenced source, cited loc. 3348).
• In 2004, it is estimated government officials stole up to $500 million, around half of the state's annual budget and the same amount as that collected from tax and other internal revenue streams (the other half of the budget coming from foreign government and NGO donations) (unnamed US Embassy report, cited loc. 2980)
• During the UN state-building intervention in Cambodia from 1992-3, each UN employee was given a daily living allowance of $145 USD in addition to his or her salary, equivalent to a year's income for most Cambodians (unreferenced source, cited loc. 1308). In the same one year period, the number of sex workers in Cambodia tripled (Crochet 1997; not cited in Brinkley)
• From studies conducted in the early 2000s, it is estimated that around 47% of all Cambodians have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or symptoms of other psychotic conditions (M. Sothara, cited loc. 2295).  
• As of 2004, it was estimated that one-quarter of all Cambodian men regularly beat their wives and children. At the end of the decade, it had risen to one-third (unnamed Cambodian government report, cited loc. 2310). It is suggested this is a result of the nation's widespread PTSD, which is now being passed on to a new generation who have grown up with dysfunctional and possibly abusive parents defined by the trauma they suffered under the Khmer Rouge (Reicherter, ctied loc. 2306). 

Reflection: Don't Judge a Culture by its Cover

My awareness of the ways book covers can reflect and reinforce stereotypes of gender - which I touched on in the last post - has come largely from those who seek to point out the way race or 'foreign' locales are represented on book covers.  The cover of a book tells somebody what to expect in reading it, but what happens when the cover doesn't reflect the content, but rather a preconceived stereotype of the setting, characters or content?

Here are two specific examples where entire cultures have been essentialised down to a single image or trope.   First, we have the classic I'm-a-book-about-an-Arabic/Islamic-woman-therefore-I-must-be-oppressed-and-have-no-individual-identity:

Source: arabglot.com

There are some excellent discections of the 'Veiled Woman' cover, including 'Translating for Bigots', 'Don't Judge Books By Their Cover - Especially Arabic Works in Translation', 'Why So Many 'Saving Muslim Women' Book Covers?' and 'Book Covers Promote Orientalist Portrayal of Muslim Women'.  All of them touch on the book covers as a vehicle for Orientalism, which: 

"...considers the way that the Middle East and Asia are represented in Western novels, biographies, and artworks.  Commonly, these depict places lost in times past, inclined towards despotic rule, and prone to odd cultural rituals that can be both pleasurable and symptomatic of weakness....The Orient was a powerfully pictured but vague location that the Westerner believed he could control and enjoy, penetrate and posess, and  hide in....The implicit goal, which repeats across time in politics, media and the popular imagination, was to reaffirm cultural difference and render things 'Oriental' marginal to the West and subordinate to Western international relations."   

-- Extract of 'Post-colonialism' by Christine Sylvester in The Globalization of World Politics, edited by Bayliss et al.

The ways small cultural artifiacts, such as book covers, can reinforce hierarchies of power between countries, communities and individuals in the international arena can be demonstrated using the I'm-a-book-set-in-Africa-so-I-must-feature-a-sunset-over-the-savannah:

Source: 'The Dangers of a Single Book Cover:The Acacia Tree Meme and "African Literature"'

The 'Acacia Tree' covers exemplify Sylvester's first example; that Africa exists within a timeless bubble of primitiveness (none of the examples feature any buildings other than small, mud huts).  As with the Arabic example, this image is developed prior to knowledge of the book's content and the views of the author (both often trying to subvert stereotypes, not reinforce them).  With regards to Africa, this is sometimes called 'Black Orientalism' or 'Afro-Orientalism', but it can also just be classified as Orientalism because of its commonalities with the ways Asia and the Arab world is stereotyped.  No matter what the region, these stereotypes have real-world effects.

In this case, they establish Africa as a homogenous place and thereby illegitimate the experience of being Xhosa or Yoruba, Shona or Kikuyu, from urban Africa or a particular region of the continent.  As a prime example, I just googled Kikuyu to make sure I was spelling it right, and except for one Wikipedia page listing all the pages that Kikuyu might refer to (5 out 7 were related directly to the ethnic group), all of the other options on the first page of my Google results refered to a species of grass.  The Kikuyu make up 22% of Kenya's population - the largest of any single ethnic group - and yet the Western world is more concerned with a native Kenyan grass that was named after them.  

Ebola illustrated the real world implications of such ignorance beautifully.  Although Europe was closer to the Western African outbreak than Southern Africa, tourism in the South took a seroius downturn.

Secondly, the Africa-as-timeless trope denies the reality of the continent's colonial history and the impact this continues to exert today.  Surely, if a Western country doesn't recognise the Rwandan genocide as a partial byproduct by colonial hierarchies that turned Hutu and Tutsi from fluid ethnic groups to castes, then making a decision about whether to intervene becomes simpler.  Ditto the coming African Debt Crisis and many other international affairs issues.  The flip side of this, I suppose, is that the depiction of Africa as primitive and backward allows for neo-colonialism; the West (and other powers, such as China, which has developed massive oil, crop and other interests in African nations) can intervene without international condemnation.  

So, while it might seem that covers featuring acacia trees or veiled women are fairly unimportant in the scheme of things,they are one small cog in a very big machine that determines the way we think about the world.