--Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
By Alex P. Vidal
NEW YORK CITY -- "You crazies and sons of a whore leave us alone. Don't impose your culture on us."
President Rodrigo "Digong" Duterte's curt message to the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) is also an attack on a lingering colonialism in the criticism of his administration's bloody assault on narcotics by non-Filipinos.
Duterte wanted to emphasize his method to eviscerate peddlers and--to some extent--users of illegal drugs is none of the business of outsiders.
The Filipinos make their own laws, the Filipinos implement their laws.
The piling up of bodies in the streets is a byproduct of Duterte's all-out war against illegal drugs, his campaign promise that earned him 16 million votes in the 2016 presidential elections.
Duterte thus became the Philippines' version of Chinua Achebe. What Achebe is in literature, Duterte is in politics.
CRITIC
A well-known Nigerian novelist and critic, Chinua Achebe has produced numerous novels, short stories, and critical essays over the past decades.
His essay "Colonialist Criticism" is an attack on a lingering colonialism in the criticism of African literature by non-Africans. The African writer writes the text or 'they produce literature, their literature goes to Europeans for analysis. Every African literature has to get thought the grids of European writers.
Born on November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Anambra and died on March 21, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, Achebe's best known critical essay is a discussion of racism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which he gave originally as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts in 1975 and is reprinted in Hopes and Impediments.
It evoked both high praise and strong antipathy on the spot and has given rise to further discussion and response as questions of racism and colonialsm have been more vigorously debated.
Given originally as a lecture at a meeting of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at Makerere University, Uganda, it is an attack on lingering colonialism in the criticism of African literature, mainly but not entirely by non-Africans.
CRITICISM
The faults of this criticism stem from implied assumptions that the African writer is a "somewhat unfinished European" and that somehow outsiders can know Africa better than the native writers.
These assumptions lead to, among other things, the specious man-of-the-worlds theory of the African intellectual and imply a continued European arrogance
Achebe's principal theoritical point involves his rejection of universalism, represented by critical statements that generalize the particularity out of African literature.
The two problems of universalism, according to Achebe, are, first, that the presumed universality that critics find is merely a synonym for the "narrow self-serving parochialism of Europe" and, second, that every literature must "speak of a particular place, evolve out of the necessities of its history, past and current, and the aspirations and destiny of its people."
UNIVERSAL
It would seem, then, that if there is to be a concrete universal in African literature it must stem from a much deeper human source than any parochial view can uncover.
But Achebe doesn't say this. Rather, his concentration in on the particular alone, for he puts literature, at least his writings, in service of the need to alter specific things in specific places, especially attitudes.
It is in this context that Achebe defends the "high moral and social earnestness" of Christopher Okigbo (the Philippines' version of Graciano Lopez-Jaena) against the charge of outspokenness.
Achebe's point is that earnestness is appropriate to Okigbo's and his situation and that a certain levity would be inappropriate.
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