The line quoted in the title is repeated throughout the first section of Mustafa Saeed's story. When first uttered it seemed innocuous, but each time he repeated it, I came closer to recognizing the problems underlying this narrative. For when compared to it's grammatical variant in the active voice i.e. "I traveled by train to Victoria Station...", it suggests, among other things, that Mustafa's journey north was not a consciously considered choice, but a result of him being swept along by "the flood of events", in a way that parallels the European females encounters with him (34). Other instances also suggest Saeed's perceived lack of agency in his journey North. His repeated self-comparisons to a quivered arrow - "the bowstring had become more taut. The arrow will shoot forth towards other unknown horizons" (22) - also suggests a perceived lack of agency on his part.
A perceived lack of agency is implicit in these instances of speech. At yet other points of his narrative, however, Saeed explicitly acknowledges the role his nature and free will played in his North-bound journey. At the beginning of his monologue he describes how, as a child, he experienced the warmth of "being free", and how this freedom stemmed from the lack of parental control over his early childhood (16). He even acknowledges the moment he decided to enter school as his first conscious "decision". This notion of free will, however, immediately emerges as problematic because his insistence on entering school can hardly be seen as a consciously free decision i.e. sheltered completely from the tide of events that gripped his country at the time. For a little before this scene is described, we are told of how the school was a contested space, upon which the antagonistic agendas of colonizer and colonized were enacted. Yet, years since that decision, and despite acknowledging the school as a contested space between colonizer and colonized, Saeed's insistence on referring to it as the first conscious choice he made, not only comes off as increasingly naive, but also shows just how problematic his notion of free will is, especially when compared to instances where a perceived lack of free will is implicit in his speech. The comparison suggests a denial on Saeed's part of how the nature of the North-South encounter structured his desire to journey North.
I find this contradiction between Saeed's idea of free will and the self-constructed teleology of his life interesting because it at once brings him closer to the women he "preys" upon. For, on a superficial level, their dalliances with Saeed appear as an enactment of their wildest sexual desires. But, like Saeed, they seem to ignore how these desires are unconsciously structured by notions of the Orient, embedded in broader geo-political structures of the North-South encounter. Thus, despite the fact that Saeed zestfully exploits Orientalist notions of his female prey, his sexual exploitation of European women can be seen as a form of self-violence. For in this sexual encounter, they appear to be pushed into certain 'freely chosen' actions by larger geo-political structures in a manner that parallels Saeed's own encounter with colonial education and Orientalist discourse.
A perceived lack of agency is implicit in these instances of speech. At yet other points of his narrative, however, Saeed explicitly acknowledges the role his nature and free will played in his North-bound journey. At the beginning of his monologue he describes how, as a child, he experienced the warmth of "being free", and how this freedom stemmed from the lack of parental control over his early childhood (16). He even acknowledges the moment he decided to enter school as his first conscious "decision". This notion of free will, however, immediately emerges as problematic because his insistence on entering school can hardly be seen as a consciously free decision i.e. sheltered completely from the tide of events that gripped his country at the time. For a little before this scene is described, we are told of how the school was a contested space, upon which the antagonistic agendas of colonizer and colonized were enacted. Yet, years since that decision, and despite acknowledging the school as a contested space between colonizer and colonized, Saeed's insistence on referring to it as the first conscious choice he made, not only comes off as increasingly naive, but also shows just how problematic his notion of free will is, especially when compared to instances where a perceived lack of free will is implicit in his speech. The comparison suggests a denial on Saeed's part of how the nature of the North-South encounter structured his desire to journey North.
I find this contradiction between Saeed's idea of free will and the self-constructed teleology of his life interesting because it at once brings him closer to the women he "preys" upon. For, on a superficial level, their dalliances with Saeed appear as an enactment of their wildest sexual desires. But, like Saeed, they seem to ignore how these desires are unconsciously structured by notions of the Orient, embedded in broader geo-political structures of the North-South encounter. Thus, despite the fact that Saeed zestfully exploits Orientalist notions of his female prey, his sexual exploitation of European women can be seen as a form of self-violence. For in this sexual encounter, they appear to be pushed into certain 'freely chosen' actions by larger geo-political structures in a manner that parallels Saeed's own encounter with colonial education and Orientalist discourse.
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