It's been far too long since my last post and, frankly, it'll probably be far too long until my next post. Time simply does not suffice to blogging these days.

Still, the elections in Zimbabwe (and their aftermath) have carried off in such a manner now that they touch upon nearly every field of interest of mine and violate nearly every moral idea of mine. That life is harsh for the opposition in Zimbabwe, recent photos of torture have surfaced, is bad enough - making it significantly worse is the severely delayed condemnation and action from other states, from the UN and from universities and political parties worldwide. We are too focused on Tibet, another contemporary tragedy, which elides the unraveling tragedy in Zimbabwe.

I rarely ever resort to Marxist-like rhetorics about power and conspiracies of the powerful, yet, this time it might seem, even to me, that the African leaders were doing too little. Mbeki asked the West to stay out and other African leaders were doing ... nothing at all. A New Era for Africa, recent TIME article, suggested that they are afraid:



This week, finally, there are good news, too: a shipment of weapons to Zimbabwe (from, guess who ... China) was stopped by activists in South Africa and later in Angola. Finally, perhaps, even other African states will put significant pressure on Zimbabwe, as The New York Times suggest:


Finally.

I spent a large part of yesterday at home reading one of the books on my reading list for this semester, 'Anthropology, Development and Modernities' by Arce and Long (eds.). A study of the responses to the outbreak of sleeping sickness in colonial Tanganyika in the early Twentieth Century forms the backbone of chapter five:

"According to local historical accounts, a new disease, with which people were unfamiliar, came to the area. It was reasoned that their misfortunes were a punishment inflicted by local spirits and would continue until they were placated." When British colonial administrator wished to extract blood samples to study the disease, the Africans could not comprehend the relationship "between the illness, the tsetse fly and blood." Similarly, the resettlement of communities away from tsetse-areas was also "incomprehensible to local people becasue they did not make the same associations between death, disease and the need to abandon the area where they lived".

Later on, I came across a relevant passage in the first chapter of Searle's book ('The Construction of Social Reality') where he distinguished between objects, causes and their functions:



My question is whether the Africans' incomprehension of European measures to deal with the outbreak could be related to functions? In European medicine, the function of blood is to carry oxygen and other nutritious substances to every part of the body. In Africa, "life is closely associated with blood" and when blood is shed, "it means that human or animal life is being given back to God" (citing John S. Mbiti's 'Introduction to African Religion'). To the Africans, then, the extraction of blood by European doctors could be equated with murder and witchery by their very definition of the function of blood.

No wonder, then, that the African wondered about the value of his body when he was paid for his blood: "and you, would you give 100 shillings for my body? This I would not like!"

For the past few hours I've not felt like doing anything constructive. There are probably about a million sensible things I could do - reading some of my curriculum, writing yet another follow-up to my post 'Legitimate Government' (which I have decided that sometime I will), finishing some of the pieces of writing I have stared but not yet finished or start some of the pieces I have planned but not yet started. But no - I don't feel like doing anything.

But - and this is the good part! - I've found a great way of passing time (usually, I'd use the phrase wasting time) without concentrating, thinking or struggling; without the feeling that 'what I'm currently doing is constructive', and yet doing something charitable: filling out reCAPTCHA forms.

I know - it feels just like you are typing meaningless words, fragments of words and arrays of letters, but, in fact, you are doing valuable work for the Internet Archive! Brilliant!

In my previous post, Legitimate Government, I argued that the legitimacy of government can be established through ethics and illustrated this by an application of utilitarist ethics. I feel, however, that the thesis was never truly completed in the previous post and intend to make a few comments in this post.

My use of utilitarist ethics to justify government is nothing new - Hobbes uses a similar argument in his 'Leviathan' when he suggests that authority is legitimate because it is in the general interest. My conclusion that "coercion is moral" is, however, not impeccable because it assumes general agreement about the validity of utilitarist ethics (or whatever ethical principle a state may be guided by). I feel, therefore, that an amendment to my previous thesis would be in place.

The idea may seem to be that the state is legitimate because it possesses a monopoly of power; because resisting it is nearly impossible. The laws imposed upon me by the state's coercion are valid only to the extent that I will suffer punishment if I violate them: there is nothing intrinsically immoral about exceeding the speed limit, yet I stick to it to avoid punishment. In those cases where the law imposes further restrictions than does ethics there is no moral obligation to follow the law. Here we respond to its laws as if the state and its was legitimate only because it possesses a monopoly of power.

My argument is that there is no moral obligation to obey laws that have no ethical counterpart, like laws restricting the use of hijabs in school or helmet laws. Nonconformity, however, entails an acceptance of the possible punishment and although a violator cannot be judged immoral he can be punished by the state apparatus. In this sense, the state and its laws are legitimate because they possess a monopoly of power and the legitimacy of the state or the government (that legitimacy discussed in the previous post) implies no ethical obligation to follow its laws: there can be morally legitimate violations of the laws of morally legitimate states.

There is a term that keeps reoccuring in the social sciences - 'legitimate government'. It is used, it seems to me, to differ between the states that have moral legitimacy; a right to existence and a sensible agenda and those that do not. To this day, however, I have never been introduced to a set of values to differ between legitimate and illegitimate governments - the term, it seems, can be applied as a social scientist seems fit.

Such a theory must obviously be wrong. Any term that is not backed by some objective definition - some quantifiable variable(s) - cannot make sense. Language is an authoritatrian institution where the meanings of each word or phrase is ordered from above so that the term cooler signifies any condition with less molecular movement than warmer, so that legitimate government has more legitimacy than illegitimate government. What, then, is the quantifiable variables determining the legitimacy of some government?

Usually, the conscent of the governed is a neccesary and sufficient condition: the state's subjects should acknowledge the state. Often, democracy is not a prerequisite as long as the state's subjects regards it as their lawful authority. Usually, also, the group labelled as 'the state's subjects' ammounts to no more than the majority (more than half) of those governed by the state.

This definition, I believe, is quite unsattisfactory: it implies that the conscent of the majority of the population is sufficient to legitimize government - it implies the less-worth of the minority. Further, it allows for 'legitimate' cruelty to minority groups; disregard for certain parts of society for the benefit of other (larger) groups.

No, it seems to me that the legitimacy of government must be derived from its moral character, and hence a number of possibilities arise. For our purposes, however, we will be conserned with moral utilitarism. The utilitarist thesis is a consequentialist one suggesting that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility and hence, a government is legitimate if and only if it provides the greatest possible utility (usually sattisfaction or happiness) to the greatest possible number of people. The right to punish, for example, is thus derived from the calcualtion that it reduces the likeliness of reoccurence of displeasure. Taxation of the wealthy, on the other hand, is justified through the economic theory of decreasing marginal utility. Finally, it seems, coercion is moral.

Government could also, as mentioned, be based on other ethical theories - primarily deontologic theories (such as Kant's) or virtue ethics. The utilitaristic ethics, however, were designed within a political framework and would seem the most fit for a purpose like ours.

I realize and regret that my blog - and, even more, my website - has been left quite static the past few weeks. Truth be told, I don't seem to find sufficient time to do anything about it these days. Nevertheless, I will attempt a recapitulation of all the things I intended to write.

Primarily, I regret that I have not been following the developments of the troubles in Kenya: it inspired TIME to feature a decent introduction to conflicts in modern Africa in the January 21 issue and the BBC have had quite excellent coverage of the subject, yet I know next to nothing about it. My intitial reaction, however, which seems to be shared by TIME's reporters, is that if Kenya can fall into such disarray, any African state can. Kenya was a stable centre of political gravity in Africa - a reason to believe in a brighter future - and then, almost over night, anarchic riots broke out in the first days of January.

When Mugabe Were, a member of a Kenyan opposition party, was shot dead yesterday, it came as no surprise. It is, however, disturbing that violence prevails. When politicians are assulted, it seems to me, however, to be rather an act of war than an act of violence and hopefully the negotiations that begin today, those mediated by Kofi Annan, will bring the unrest to and end before it escalades even further.

I would, however, like to mention the other seemingly stable and well-functioning state in sub-Saharan Africa: South Africa. A quite significant and quite rich white population makes several South African cities seem like European cities and the tourist needn't see African poverty at all. Still, a great number of poor slum-dwellers persist in the periphery (you didn't think the end of apartheid meant the end of being apart, did you?) and the political leadership is continously charged with corruption, fraud and even rape; AIDS is a major problem, so is unemployment. When the problems disguised by apartheid are revealed, South Africa seems no longer to be the great power that invaded Angola in 1988 or the wealthy economy potrayed by the Waterfront mall in Cape Town. Rather, it seems, South Africa is yet another African country with internal conflicts, extensive slums, poverty and extensive corruption.

South Africa's democracy has been functioning decently since 1994. With a new leadership - embodied, in a sense, by Zuma's leading position in the ANC and his 2005 break with Mbeki's government - the old order will either hold or break. If it is to hold, the new leadership will require support independently of the old panel of Nobel-prize laureates (Mandela, Tutu, de Klerk); must do on its own.

The TIME article concludes, quite obviously, that "the emergence of a more peaceful, prosperous Africa depends on Africans themselves." Obvious, but certainly true.

I've been in a strange mood lately; one that I cannot quite name. I think that should be quite evident from my last few posts, too, in particular, perhaps 2007 in Review and Of Goals and Purpose. Today, however, it has manifested itself in my actions as well – currently, I’m sitting in the sofa upstairs all alone despite a very nice invitation to a party. It just doesn’t make sense.

Nevertheless, I have enjoyed reading an article from one of my courses this semester – a 1991 article by Arturo Escobar on anthropology and development, where he uses a rather ingenious phrase in the conclusion: Third World countries “embarked upon the task of un-underdeveloping themselves”. I don’t quite know why I find the phrase s amusing; it could be because it because this is yet another clever way of phrasing the postcolonialist stance – the subjugation of every culture to the Western modernity – or because it is a way of indicating that developing (as in reaching the final state of development) seems impossible.

I haven’t really thought much more about the phrase until now, because I made an honest attempt at finishing Nkrumah’s book (which failed badly). I have, however, finally reached the final chapter. The book has been a delightful read – an interesting combination of classic European culture and African thought and an interesting introduction to African history. Currently, I am taking great interests in Nkrumah’s considerations over the three segments of African society: the traditional, the Western and the Islamic. Their coexistence and the competition between them – that between Western free market and African morale (“Africa’s humanist and egalitarian principles of society”, writes Nkrumah, “requires socialism”) – reminds me of my own fascination with cultural intersection: that people perceive this world so differently that communication is, at times, severely hindered and conflicts erupt. I regret, I must admit, the excessive spread of Western market-liberalism and the erasure of cultures that it entailed; I wish, at times, that I was born before the peak of colonialism so that I, too, could be exited by truly different cultures. Nkrumah changed my perspective on this by illustrating how the processes of cultural unification are ancient and not only Western-imperialistic: cultures have been crushed without Western interference; Islamic slave trade in Northern Africa, religious disunity in India, Bantu pressure on San groups in Southern Africa. Western modernity is different only because it encompasses the entire globe; because, whether they like it or not and whether they admit it or not, (nearly) every society on Earth is influenced, in some way or another, by the West.

Imperialism and cultural destructivism is not inherent in market-liberalism, it is inherent in society as an institution. Hence, the difference (in this respect) a century or two ago was not that society or culture was different, but that technology was not yet sophisticated enough for one culture to dominate every culture.

The new semester starts today - well, I was on campus yesterday, too, to attend a meeting and buy the last few books, but the first lecture is today. The start of the holiday - on 4. December - feels like forever ago, and, indeed, a lot has happened since then: I applied for a myriad of jobs and got my second choice, celebrated Christmas, visited Grimstad, attended a party on New Year's, went skiing in Trysil and, now, finally, I am sitting at my desk thinking about the holiday that just passed. It is strange, however, that it is not any one of those proper events that I remember the best, rather, it is the time I spent gluing photos into an album; the time I spent thinking about what I have done with my life so far.

Indeed, looking at the photos of my younger self - a kid in a tree somewhere in Africa, a boy in a kayak somewhere near the Futungo presidential residence in Luanda or some youth before the Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro - and even more recent photos from the last few summers and the russetid this May at the end of my High School years - I get a strange feeling that it cannot be me. It isn't me, but someone else: so much has changed. Angola, in particular, suddenly became somewhere distant and different; somewhere exotic and quite exciting rather than the 'home' it used to be.



One photo in particular evokes the feeling of Angola as something distant, yet very familiar (indeed, like when conflicting information from your inner ear and your eyes make you car-sick, the conflicting feelings of Angola as something familiar and near and Angolas as something distant and exotic are somewhat sickening): the somewhat faded, carefully pastel colours of the photo reminds me of a book with photos from 1960's Angola, but the motive (the tree from our back yard, my sister and I, the neighbouring house in the background) is still quite fresh in my memory - so fresh, indeed, that I can still smell the damp air, the exotic plants, feel the damp grass and the warm cement pathways, taste the cereals I ate for breakfast.

For my album, I ordered an enlarged print of this particular photo and let it have a page nearly for itself because, of all the photos in the album, this is the one that still makes me taste, smell and feel Africa.

Since July 2003, when I left Angola I've been determined to return as soon as an opportunity arises. Yesterday, that thought became more real than ever when a fellow student of mine was talking about going to Angola for a field trip: if she can go, I can go. But - I came to realize - I've been determined to return to Angola, not go there; I've wanted to live in Belas with my family and the same neighbours, go to the same school with the same teachers, have the same driver and the same maid, eat the same food and do the same things - all of which is unattainable. Going to Angola would not be returning to Angola; would not be returning 'home': I have changed and Angola has certainly changed. My photos, therefore, are quite like the photos in the book; depicting the past, depticting something that has changed.

When I returned to Norway in 2003, I had set myself two goals - the first was to do the IB, the second was to get a job that would allow me to return to Angola. Half a year ago, in May, I accomplished the first when I finished my IB exams and got my diploma; during the past two months I've been realizing that the second goal is unattainable. Hence, I currently live not without purpose, but without a proper goal, realizing that time passes quickly when one is not really striving for anything.

I don't know if it is primarily a Norwegian thing, but it seems to me that disliking corporations with more than five employees and anybody with money or success has become the zenith of political correctness (indeed, the word 'hate' is more often used - abused? - than the word 'dislike' and hence, to emphasize my more correct phrasing, the word is italicized). My recent annoyance with this was sparked, really, by a note posted by a Facebook-friend of mine about members of the Republican Party as "corporate whore[s]", looking not for conservative politicians, but "an effective wager of class war", and reminded me of a girl I spoke with last semester: she informed me that Amartya Sen was not the nice old man he appeared to be, but rather an "egoistic free-market economist".

For some absurd reason, the radical Marxism of the 1970's seems to be thriving among modern youth as well: the almost paranoid search for (hidden) structures of class-oppression and abuse. Like feminism is misunderstood by most teenage girls, Marx's structuralist analysis of capitalism seems misperceived my most young adults. Taken out of its context and its time, his ideas on class struggle, social evolution and revolution are misplaced and abused on modern (democratic) party-politics: the analytical tools of a revolutionary ideology are misapplied to a nonrevolutionary situation; the division of society into the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is applied to a new society of new, and perhaps more complex structures and the potentially useful set of tools, ideas and phrases defined by Marx are reduced to mere silly, everyday jargon.

In his quite famous 1985 book 'Making Sense of Marx', the Norwegian academic Jon Elster concludes by discarding Marx's economics and Marx's theory of history as the development of productive forces: Marxism, the ideology, it seems, does not exist. Trying to apply that ideology, however, results in the need for this proof - ironically, it is the application of Marxism as if it was a complete philosophical system that calls for the abolishment of Marxism as a complete philosophical system - and the potential use of each isolated analytical insight tends to be forgotten. The great irony, it seems to me, is that those self-proclaimed Marxists and left-wing extremists are the worst enemies of Marxist thought; those who necessitate the proof of Marxism's inexistence.

The Marxist jargon in modern language should therefore be abolished; left behind: Marxist analysis, I believe, should be respected as a useful tool in academic study (of history as well as economics and political science) and as a set of potentially controversial ideas on modern society, but should not be misused and abused by youth trying to be radical in the politically correct fashion. Indeed, this ignorant and arrogant abuse of a faction of socialist thought must be the ultimate disrespect to the working class you claim to respect more than I do.

Inspired by Jessica over at indexed, I drew a little sketch by the breakfast table this morning:



(It should be noted, though, that her cards do look a little nicer).

I have realized now that my blog may seem quite incoherent; like mere fragments of thoughts with no connection at all. If it seems that way, that is a good thing because the blog is a result of fragmented thoughts and confusion - of trying to make sense of the world I live in and of my own life - and if there is some logical chronology of my posts I must have missed the essence of my own thoughts. This week, however, has given me some valuable time to think over those posts (and all the ideas that never made it to being posted: those that were noted down in some Word document and saved or in the margin of some book) and to try to make sense of them as a whole.

It all started in late August this year as I was sitting in the university bookstore, passing time and waiting for my photo to be taken for my student ID. Quite soon, my eyes rested on the cover of a Penguin paperback with a map of Africa on its cover, a rather small book - Kapuscinski's 'The Shadow of the Sun'. I picked it up and started reading: "I lived in Africa for several years. I first went there in 1957. Then, over the next forty years, I returned whenever the opportunity arose." This book, I thought, could provide some interesting insights to the inner workings of Africa - to African history, politics and people - and I bought it immediately.

Then, on the twelfth of September I spent the day with Professor of literature Jakob Lothe and was particularly interested to learn about the various interpretations of the term 'postcolonialism' - indeed, so interested that I bought and read Young's 'Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction':


While reading that book I made some notes about the absurdities of postcolonialism - indeed, my own term. The absurdities of postcolonialism are rooted in the possibility of belonging, yet not belonging, of being, yet not being accepted. Let me quote Sartre's introduction to Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth': "Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it." This is reminiscent of Achebe's critique of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness': "Africa as a setting and backdrop […] eliminates the African as a human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"

Thus far postcolonialism may seem like some abstract scholarly construction, some idea ungraspable to the public - to me - and some neoimperial ideology that once again establishes the superiority of Westerners over the rest of the world. Such an understanding, I believe, is false. Postcolonialism is not about establishing some sophisticated and unavailable understanding of non-Westerners, not about reestablishing the notions of 'them' and 'us'. Rather, I believe, postcolonialism is about the outsider - 'L'Étranger' in Camus' words, the 'Steppenwolf' in Hesse's. Let me explain.

Young's definition does not discriminate between skin colors or nationality, certainly a carefully considered choice intended to include westerners in postcolonialism: while a white middle-class European is inside in many respects, he may still be an outsider if his thoughts and ideas are outside the commonly accepted paradigm. A white European who focuses his thoughts not on Europe or Western ideas, but on Third-World history and colonialism, for example, would probably be a postcolonial subject rather than an European (and certainly not a colonial subject!).

The example was not randomly chosen - it rather reflects my perception of myself: in the light of Young's book, I increasingly see myself as a postcolonial subject; I see most Third Culture Kids as postcolonial subjects - as people without a proper belonging physically as well as intellectually. My analysis of Koltès' 'Black Battles with Dogs' touches upon this - the strangeness of white man in Africa, the void of reality in white condominiums in Africa: the absurdities of postcolonialism ...

My understanding of myself as a postcolonial subject is based on another circumstance as well - one which I have been thinking through quite thoroughly since the thirteenth of November when it occurred to me in my dreams for the first time in years. It must have been the second year in Angola - when I was thirteen years old - that I came to see a young girl who had fallen into a pool at night and who was fighting (quite desperately so) for just a breath of air. It had been by chance that I exited a large glass door to get a ball and suddenly found myself face to face with a person who was on the border between life and death - a person I was sure, then, that I would witness dying. Luckily, her older sister heard my calls for help and came running and, for what I know, the episode has largely been forgotten. I feel, however, that the experience has given me another understanding of living and dying: in the back of my head, I am quite certain, a little girl will always remind me that life is fragile and that life is quite unjust.

Thinking about this, however, also evokes a certain feeling of loneliness - a feeling that I was alone then and that nobody can quite understand what I thought and did; that I cannot understand what was going through my head or why I simply stood by the pool screaming. It was when I was feeling this way that I first understood EMINEM, that I first really enjoyed his music. Some of his later songs are about being alone, outside and desperate and, it seems to me, quite invaluable on those very few occasions when my very existence seems sinister. This thought, in return, led to a quite depressing idea of modern teenagers: if such a feeling is the background for my understanding of EMINEM and EMINEM is immensely popular then either I am quite exceptional or a significant proportion of modern teenagers feel left out and misunderstood.

I certainly hope my conclusion is wrong.

I am seeing now that this post has grown fairly long (indeed, I've been writing for two hours straight) and quite confusing: initially, I was quite optimistic and referring to the day with Jakob Lothe that I won for my essay on racism in South Africa and I ended up describing the single most depressive moment of my life. The idea, however, was to give an indication of the thinking I've been doing the later half of this year, to sum up and explain and to allow me to start anew next year. I intend to keep on posting, to keep on thinking, but maybe - just maybe - going through the most prominent thoughts from this year will help me think along new lines and about new topics next year.

Reading Kapuscinski and, somewhat later, flicking through Friedmann's 'The World is Flat' has given me new ideas and new goals. My grandfather was a sailor and later a spy in the Second World War and, further back, one of my great grandfathers was a sea captain and made a table that is still today in use in our living room. I tend to respect all of them - and many other s- as people who are remembered and respected decades after their death by someone who never met them (me). It has become my goal to be remembered and respected; to do something quite significant, to contribute to some effort, to do something a little extraordinary that I will be remembered for. Postcolonialism becomes, in that context, merely the point from which I have to depart, a great start and a good means but not a sufficient end. The year that starts in about 24 hours will hopefully, therefore, come with some new ideas and new energy to strive towards that ultimate goal.

A quick glance on this edition of TIME should reveal two great ironies - primarily, Poniewozik's list 'The Power of 10' on why 'Top 10 ...' lists tend to be everywhere in December. Indeed, the irony is intentional and quite humorous.

The other irony, that TIME - a major news magazine - should publish the list of the years '10 Most Underreported Stories', may be intentional but is certainly not very humorous. On the other hand, it shows a certain reflective character, a willingness to improve or simply some awareness on TIME's behalf; it shows that somebody in TIME Magazine have taken the time to sit down and consider what stories they should have been more keen to feature.

And ... even better: number six on that list is Angola's economy: "After nearly three decades of civil war that ended in 2002, Angola has one of the world's fastest-growing economies. Thanks to increased oil production, its estimated 24% growth rate this year is nearly double that of China's." While TIME featured a story on Angola and Mauritius about a month ago (remember Good Africa and Bad Africa?), that remains one of the very few references to Angola I've seen in mainstream media this year.

If my logic is right, however - if the authoring of the list has served as some end-of-year reflection for TIME's editors and journalists - and if TIME intends to keep changing and improving, then maybe the list entails the acknowledgment that Angola is interesting and maybe, just maybe, we'll see more of Angola in TIME and other media in 2008.

I just got back home from seeing 'The Nutcracker'. Indeed, the performance was an amateur one - featuring my sister, which was why I saw it - but as far as I could see the quality was decent and the story was conveyed quite effectively. Let it be said, then, that I cannot recall having seen 'The Nutcracker' before, my only experience with ballet must be another amateur performance of 'Swan Lake', and cannot be one to judge the quality of the performance.

That is not what I intended to do, either - I intended rather to comment on the adaptation of Hoffmann's underlying story, 'Nußknacker und Mausekönig' (1816), its similarity to Caroll's stories about Alice (1865 and 1871) and how I see it placed in Russian history. Well, the stories, it must be admitted, are only similar because they are about a young girl's fantasies about some wonderland; somewhere surreal and different. Both Alice and Clara are brought up in wealthy homes in Belle Epoch Europe - a seemingly boring upbringing where children were merely to be small adults and certainly not to be heard or seen. Bored and quite lonely, both girls fall asleep and dream about a magic universe where they are both quite different from the others and almost continuously have someone's attention. Where they are, to be frank, children by modern standards.

Remembering Robert Massie's biography of the last Tsar Family ('Nicholas & Alexandra'), I can see how Clara and her fantasy could fit into that family. As Rasputin - the mad priest with the hypnotizing eyes who cured Tsarevich Alexei's illness from 1903 to 1916 - illustrated, there was room for ideas of magic in the Russian aristocracy. Indeed, Tsarist Russia must have been a bizarre place - a place of some very rich and many very poor; the place of some of the finest arts created in Europe and, by 1917, the most backwards political system in Europe; a place where social status was predetermined, but where a poor peasant priest could rise to prominence - and Gogol's (1809-1852) stories captures the absurdities, just like the story of Tchaikovsky's ballet does. Overall, the story - as it was told on the premiere of the ballet in 1892 in St. Petersburg - was probably not only about the boredom of a little girl, but rather about the absurdities of an entire empire.

In the turbulent times that had been brewing in Russia since the 1861 emancipation of the serfs and which reached their peaks first in 1905 and ultimately in 1917, an aristocratic girl like Clara must certainly have needed a decent man: The Nutcracker is both protective, brave and strong. Indeed, The Nutcracker appears to me to be the ideal man that Tsar Nicholas tried to be to his family after his abdication in 1917 and the kind of man Yuri Zhivago in 'Doctor Zhivago' (1957) failed to be to his wife. After the First World War and 1917 revolutions, however, the mysticism and idealism of life both in Russia and Europe were in a sense destroyed (by Soviet ideology and new nightmares of death and terror) and writing about the ideal man could perhaps no longer make sense - perhaps, therefore, The Nutcracker was a truly and solely Belle Epoch character? If so, that explains his absence in the best known literature from last century.

Well, I've been playing around with the feed for this blog tonight and it should now be appearing both on Facebook and on Technorati now. In addition, the feed URL has been added in the right-hand margin.

Until yesterday I had not heard of Koltès - a homosexual French playwright who died of AIDS in 1989. Yesterday, however, I was on Oslo to see his 1979 play 'Black Battles with Dogs' - a play about outsiders set in an expat condominium in Africa. Before we left, I promised to write a review of it et ici il est.

When Koltès set his play in a white condominium in postcolonial Africa he chose a space void of reality, a place isolated from the real world by armed gurads and a wall. On the inside is an ideal world - one where flowers blossom every day, where the only problem is whether to drink American bourbon or Scottish single-malt whiskey, where working out that the World's population could fit comfortably in forty-storied apartment buildings on half the area of France seems sensible - an ideal world created by the exploitation of the outside world. In the play, Cal has killed a black man and dead man's brother, Alboury, comes for the body. The body, however, has been dumped and Cal's superior Horn has to handle the situation. As Alboury enters, the ideality of Horn's fake life is being disturbed as reality - that a man is dead - is reaching him and Alboury is determined to get the body: no lies or bribe makes him surrender.

The surreality of Horn and Cal's world is underlined, in Eirik Stubø's production, by the minimalistic use of props (a chair, three bottles of whiskey and a whiskey glass are the only non-human elements on a black scene headed by a red neon sign with the word 'Africa') creating, in a sense, something like a Platonic ideal world. This makes the production timeless, for while racism may change over time the idea of it will probably remain quite unchanged, and that the script is nearly thirty years old is not at all felt.

Koltès intended theme - I'd guess - was not Africa or racism, but rather outsiders. The homosexual playwright is reputed to have felt foreign in a heterosexual world and thus moved about between the USA, Latin America and Africa for a long time, hoping to find a home. Indeed, the white condominium in postcolonial Africa is not only void of reality, it is also a place without natives, a place where nobody is at home and a place where everyone should feel foreign, and Koltès is free to experiment with that feeling.

Ironically, it is Leone, who has just arrived in Africa that day - who is the least at home - who manages the best: she is friendly and honest and makes makes friends with the other honest character - Alboury - before she leaves Africa. Being the only character to depart, to find the way back to where she belongs, Leone could be seen as the sole winner of the play. Horn, on the other hand, loses not only his girlfriend, but also the hope of returning from Africa: quite like Mr. Macintosh in Lessing's The Antheap, he is stuck on the Dark Continent with a lot of money that he has no use for. He orders Cal to shoot Alboury and Cal obeys - the two white men become murderers and the black man dies.

Koltès seems to deem white man's presence in Africa both hopeless and meaningless - unwanted by the Africans and destructive to ourselves (Horn's moral decay is perhaps quite similar to that represented by Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness) - but the play never feels moralizing and he never suggests that Europeans should leave Africa. In that sense, the play is almost absurdist: it is describing a conflict without suggesting or even attempting to suggest some solution; without concern for the possibility of the existence of a solution.

The miscommunication between the characters is humorous (particularly that between Horn and Alboury) and several scenes are poetic (especially those where Alboury meets Leone), but the ending is sad. My experience of the play is probably quite different from the popular experience of it because I have been the expat in the white condominium, the person isolated from reality, been, to a large extent, like Horn and Cal. To me, therefore, the play represented a sinister understanding of those three years I spent in Angola - though I did not drink whiskey or shoot Angolans, the feeling of not really belonging, of not really understanding why things are the way they are is very familiar. Indeed, Koltès described expat life in a realistic way; in a sickening way.