Exploitation

Well I'm just gonna come out and say it. Karen Blixen is a self-righteous five letter word. Feel free to pick your own favorite five letter word. I know some of you can feel me on that. For those of you who are asking themselves, "Who's Blixen?" Blixen is the one quoted at the beginning of the class handout A Voyeur's Paradise ... Images of Africa who compares African natives to ants that you poke with a stick. The nerve of someone refering another human being to that of an insect is just plain old rude. No offense ants. So what if you don't have wings like your cooler cousins, the wasps, your highly developed social structure based on chemical information and your go get attitude makes you a fascinating creature that deserves respect. But come on we're human. And humans deserve respect. Except for Blixen. She doesn't deserve respect. Not for her work on Out of Africa. I want to know who she is, where she came from, when she wrote that, and what the heck was she doing in Africa? I thought Vera's point, when highlighting the tendecy of the invader to "reduce the act of invasion to child play," to be extremely revealing. My biggest question. If Blixen was using Ants as a simile for Africans, then what the heck did 'poke a stick into their ant-hill' mean? With the all the terrible things you learn about when studying history I bet I don't even want to know. I can take a good guess. Sticks are synonymous with really big guns and ant-hills with villages . . . homes . . . and beds. Stories of human exploitation, depressing and enraging as they are, do serve a beneficial purpose. They're a reminder that humans are not perfect. We are a work in progress. We are an evolving species on a precarious journey that leads to higher and higher states of consciousness. And that the one supreme and true 'race' is all in it together. The Human Race!
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