Book review: As an African, Daouda is scandalised by white Western man’s claim she is a victim
We're watching the same failure loop.
Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us by Marie Kawthar Daouda
This is one of the best books of its kind yet published.
Marie Kawthar Daouda urges us to love Britain and its rich, messy history, and to spurn claims to victimhood based on race.
She tells white Western man to stop “infantilising” himself by proclaiming all the evil in the world to be the result of his own original sin in subjecting the rest of the globe to his imperial designs.
When white Western man imposes this view, surreptitiously boasting all the while of his own humility, he not only lodges a paradoxical claim to continued moral authority, even one might say to moral empire, but also infantilises Africans, and other once subject peoples, by depriving them of moral responsibility.
Africans are victims: this is one of the pernicious consequences of the dogma promoted by what Daouda calls the Authoritarian Left. Africans are not allowed to take credit for their achievements, or blame for their failures.
Daouda is an African. She was born in Morocco, once known, she reminds us, as the Cherifian Empire. From the first, one may guess from her book (I have never met her), she possessed a certain independence of mind, and a love of learning.
When she was 17, she moved to France, “another former empire”, to continue her education. She writes with gallic lucidity, the exactitude of a French scholar who will not be fobbed off with the blurry evasions to which an English man of letters might out of charity or feeble-mindedness resort.
Twelve years later she moved again, from Paris to Oxford, where she is now a Lecturer in French at Oriel College. Sometimes an outsider can see more clearly what is good about a society than do those born into it.
Here is what Daouda writes on the last of her 162 pages:
“I lay down these few lines for all the friends I have made, living and dead, in Britain. I think of John Keats, who opened my eyes to love and beauty…I think of Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose Little Princess and Secret Garden told me of hope and grace when I was a rather lonely child…I think of Saint John Henry Newman, who left Oriel when he became a Catholic and came back when he became a cardinal, whose Callista threw me from dreams to prayer. I think of Saint Thomas More, of his steady, slightly frightened but so brave gaze in that Holbein painting of which a clumsy copy adorns the Oriel Hall. I think of the green hills beyond the ghost gates of Oxford, of the hills’ deep soil full of stories, and of the blue sky behind the hazy clouds, full of the dreams that rise with the chiming bells. I think of all the people who have seen the land, the stones, the sky that I can see, and who stood alone, on tiptoe on the edge of eternity, with their desire for …
We're watching the same failure loop.
Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us by Marie Kawthar Daouda
This is one of the best books of its kind yet published.
Marie Kawthar Daouda urges us to love Britain and its rich, messy history, and to spurn claims to victimhood based on race.
She tells white Western man to stop “infantilising” himself by proclaiming all the evil in the world to be the result of his own original sin in subjecting the rest of the globe to his imperial designs.
When white Western man imposes this view, surreptitiously boasting all the while of his own humility, he not only lodges a paradoxical claim to continued moral authority, even one might say to moral empire, but also infantilises Africans, and other once subject peoples, by depriving them of moral responsibility.
Africans are victims: this is one of the pernicious consequences of the dogma promoted by what Daouda calls the Authoritarian Left. Africans are not allowed to take credit for their achievements, or blame for their failures.
Daouda is an African. She was born in Morocco, once known, she reminds us, as the Cherifian Empire. From the first, one may guess from her book (I have never met her), she possessed a certain independence of mind, and a love of learning.
When she was 17, she moved to France, “another former empire”, to continue her education. She writes with gallic lucidity, the exactitude of a French scholar who will not be fobbed off with the blurry evasions to which an English man of letters might out of charity or feeble-mindedness resort.
Twelve years later she moved again, from Paris to Oxford, where she is now a Lecturer in French at Oriel College. Sometimes an outsider can see more clearly what is good about a society than do those born into it.
Here is what Daouda writes on the last of her 162 pages:
“I lay down these few lines for all the friends I have made, living and dead, in Britain. I think of John Keats, who opened my eyes to love and beauty…I think of Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose Little Princess and Secret Garden told me of hope and grace when I was a rather lonely child…I think of Saint John Henry Newman, who left Oriel when he became a Catholic and came back when he became a cardinal, whose Callista threw me from dreams to prayer. I think of Saint Thomas More, of his steady, slightly frightened but so brave gaze in that Holbein painting of which a clumsy copy adorns the Oriel Hall. I think of the green hills beyond the ghost gates of Oxford, of the hills’ deep soil full of stories, and of the blue sky behind the hazy clouds, full of the dreams that rise with the chiming bells. I think of all the people who have seen the land, the stones, the sky that I can see, and who stood alone, on tiptoe on the edge of eternity, with their desire for …
Book review: As an African, Daouda is scandalised by white Western man’s claim she is a victim
We're watching the same failure loop.
Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us by Marie Kawthar Daouda
This is one of the best books of its kind yet published.
Marie Kawthar Daouda urges us to love Britain and its rich, messy history, and to spurn claims to victimhood based on race.
She tells white Western man to stop “infantilising” himself by proclaiming all the evil in the world to be the result of his own original sin in subjecting the rest of the globe to his imperial designs.
When white Western man imposes this view, surreptitiously boasting all the while of his own humility, he not only lodges a paradoxical claim to continued moral authority, even one might say to moral empire, but also infantilises Africans, and other once subject peoples, by depriving them of moral responsibility.
Africans are victims: this is one of the pernicious consequences of the dogma promoted by what Daouda calls the Authoritarian Left. Africans are not allowed to take credit for their achievements, or blame for their failures.
Daouda is an African. She was born in Morocco, once known, she reminds us, as the Cherifian Empire. From the first, one may guess from her book (I have never met her), she possessed a certain independence of mind, and a love of learning.
When she was 17, she moved to France, “another former empire”, to continue her education. She writes with gallic lucidity, the exactitude of a French scholar who will not be fobbed off with the blurry evasions to which an English man of letters might out of charity or feeble-mindedness resort.
Twelve years later she moved again, from Paris to Oxford, where she is now a Lecturer in French at Oriel College. Sometimes an outsider can see more clearly what is good about a society than do those born into it.
Here is what Daouda writes on the last of her 162 pages:
“I lay down these few lines for all the friends I have made, living and dead, in Britain. I think of John Keats, who opened my eyes to love and beauty…I think of Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose Little Princess and Secret Garden told me of hope and grace when I was a rather lonely child…I think of Saint John Henry Newman, who left Oriel when he became a Catholic and came back when he became a cardinal, whose Callista threw me from dreams to prayer. I think of Saint Thomas More, of his steady, slightly frightened but so brave gaze in that Holbein painting of which a clumsy copy adorns the Oriel Hall. I think of the green hills beyond the ghost gates of Oxford, of the hills’ deep soil full of stories, and of the blue sky behind the hazy clouds, full of the dreams that rise with the chiming bells. I think of all the people who have seen the land, the stones, the sky that I can see, and who stood alone, on tiptoe on the edge of eternity, with their desire for …
