Monsters, Masters

How does one teach the works of writers and thinkers who have abused their power or committed heinous crimes?

- Saikat Majumdar

“THE night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard.” Few sentences capture the ironic but inevitable sequence of the different stages of colonialism—the military violence of the battlefield followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. Hard and soft power in perfect symbiosis for Europe to control Africa.

These words by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o never fail in the classroom. So far, they have never failed in my teaching career—not in the years in North America where power is easily understood in terms of race relations, not here in India where power, status, and privilege are just as easily grasped as colonial inheritances from the Western world. I’ve often taught Ngũgĩ ’s powerful, polemical plea for the use of African languages in literary creation. It is one of the most vivid and incisive illustrations of the power of ideology—the soft power of religion, culture and education, as that has been pointed out by Marxist critics of the capitalist State. Leading among these critics is the French political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose essay on the ideological work of family, church, and education prepares the ground richly for the class’ understanding of the ideological invasion by European colonialism when we read Ngũgĩ ’s polemic.

Althusser is the creator of some of the most pointed and trenchant insights into power and control in the modern state and the free market. Althusser also killed his wife, the sociologist and activist Hélène Rytmann-Légotien—strangled her in a fit of depression, for which he was sent to the clinics, not to prison. How does one square these two facts with each other? And how do I feel teaching his works for so many years, writing about his ideas, sometimes taking recourse to them to articulate my own? A fatal agent of male violence on women, no matter what his mental state?