Fiction Lecture 11 (The Museum)

Transcript

Bring to an end my section of the course with you. So if you remember, we started talking about. I started talking about this last. The last class, but we talked a bit about the bit about the background and the structure and the structure of differences, the markers of difference that sort of help to structure the story, organize the way that it's told.

So today we're going to move on to look at something more thematic, really, which is one of the major themes in the story, the dynamics of migration and integration.

And the story opens this area up in very interesting ways and ways because it's a short story that you know very, very much on individual experience of these issues.

It's a story which does focus on how individuals feel being migrants and how they experience or don't experience feelings of integration.

And that's a very individual matter. But it's also a story that raises these larger questions about the structures around that experience and how structures made themselves be part of maybe both the problem sometimes of integration or lack of integration, but also maybe part of the solution or forms of integration, or at least forms of respect or mutual respect.

So we look firstly at how these characters deal with certain things.

But then I want to look at the museum itself in the story as a kind of an institution that has something to contribute to this whole kind of dynamic, as I say, of integration.

So let's look at a couple. You know, one of the initial sort of moments in the story where you're introduced to this theme.

Problems and issues around migration and integration.

There's this case that rise in the. In. In terms of obstacles to integration. And here there's a particular. Folks, I want to give. You have a particular sort of. Sort of relation to the kind of specter of violence around questions of integration.

So two quotes here is explaining about the situation for these overseas students at the state who have come here to study for this master's degree in Scotland in Aborigine.

So the quotation here reads, overseas students had explained about the famous quotation marks and have hinted that they should be grateful things were worse farther south, less hospitable.

So in other words, you're likely to be here in Scotland rather than England, because in England you'll be treated even, you know, more inhospitably than you are up here in Scotland.

Supposedly in the cafeteria, drinking coffee with Asapa.

The picture of hospital Scotland. This is, you know, Shaja and her friends in the cafeteria.

Fellow students. Badr, the Malaysian. Yesterday our windows got smashed. Like today is afraid to go out. Okay, so here's an actual presence of violence in this story.

And the. The assumption here, the implication is that the windows were smashed because.

Because these people are migrants. Right? Now, there's another quote here a little bit further on where that.

That story that b tell for the other group kind. So let's sit with Asapha and the others. Mistakes follow mistakes. This is Shaja thinking about what she's doing. And if you recall when we were saying the last day, you know, she's.

She's kind of herself and unsure how to navigate and negotiate this world that she's in.

So this is part of her thing, you know, how can I stop making mistakes?

What mistakes am I making? Mistakes compounded on mistakes and so on. So it's kind of a reflection of her uncertainty here in this moment.

But anyway, let's sit with Asapa and the others. Mistakes follow mistakes. Across the cafeteria, the Turkish girl saw them together.

Now, this is herself and Brian. Let's go sit together. Now the act of Shaja and Brian going together to sit together in a cafeteria causes a reaction across the paper together and raised her perfect eyebrows.

Badger met Shadja's eyes and quickly looked away.

Goes on a little bit. Maybe the boys who smashed Badger's windows looked like Brian, but with fiercer eyes, no glasses.

She must push him away from her. She must make him dislike her. So, you know, her own kind of attempt to develop a relation to Brian, relation to Brian is shaped and conditioned by this violence and threat of violence and a kind of barrier situation.

She feels okay, actually, maybe, and could be one of those people who is actually racist or who would throw stones or hurt me in some way.

So part of her is attracted to him, wants to develop a relationship.

But there's another part of her. She's conflicted, she's torn because another part says, no, I've got to keep my distance.

I don't know, he might be a danger to me. Now, these two passages and a number of passages around that part of the story kind of delineate these obstacles to integration.

And I've kind of listed them there in the box on the right hand side.

Conflicting narratives, you know, for instance, the narrative of the glossy grove says, oh, we'll be very welcome here in Aberdeen, versus the actual experience of some of these students who don't feel very welcome at all, in fact treated with hostility.

So there's two conflicting narratives. There's the story of Badger who tells about his experience, and then there's a story told by the Blasi brochure.

Two very different Stories. Then there's actual violence against migrants, which is obvious and obstacle to.

But then the second passage here also illustrates something interesting about the group in itself, the group of overseas students, the migrants themselves.

And the kind of suspicion arises within that group.

You know, they. They hear the stories, they tell the stories, and they develop a kind of group collective thinking where, you know, maybe, you know, we should be careful, maybe this is not a hospitable place.

And that kind of suspicion, which Shadra feels in the glance of a Turkish girl who seems to be looking skeptically at the fact that she's now sitting with Brian or Badger, who looks at her, sees them together and.

And actually looks away. Suspicion among the migrant group being a kind of barrier to her integration, if you like, or her development of a relationship to Brian.

And all of this is also conditioned by. Look at again in a few minutes, which is the idea of, know, reading the signs or misreading the signs.

You know, she's trying to read Brian and understand, is he a threat or is he not?

Is he like these other racist yellows who throw stones at Badger stuff, or is he a kind person?

Is he a person that I have relationship with? So she's trying to read the signs. And also, you know, the story is kind of suggesting or showing the way, which sometimes we're in danger of misreading the signs, and we don't want to misread them, but we're not quite certain how we should read the signs around us, whether it's a person or a story or an event or a text or a picture, whatever it is.

So the problems of uncertainty of interpretation or the possibility of misreading itself becomes a barrier to integration.

And I picked up this thing too, but all the way back to young Goodman Brown too.

Very different story, different context, but also story about the problems of reading the signs.

How do you know what's true? And a lot of stories raise this as a question, you know, along the way.

They get you to think about that. The other note here in the box is just to note how the differences among the migrants, okay, so they come from different parts of the world.

There's nothing that they have in common except that they are all migrants.

They're all, you know, elders, if you like, within the Sulak, build themselves to be outsiders.

So they're all visiting students, you could say.

And that gives a coherence or an identity that overcomes or embraces to some extent the differences among them, which might be just as great between any individual one of them and a Scottish person.

So it's interesting the way that that kind of experience of threat or danger or oppression or whatever it is, can bring people who are ordinarily very, very different, even extremely different, brings them together.

Common sort of experience or common cause. Okay, now the quotation from somebody later, just a few.

Again, the issue, the theme of the integration, how those things work or don't work.

And on the potential power of dialogue. Okay, actually, then not just looking at somebody and worrying about it or trying to understand the thinking, but actually engaging in conversation and how that might, you know, offer some sort of breakthrough or not.

So this is an exchange between Shaja and Brian. And it's interesting because it says something about.

She herself is being transformed by this encounter with.

She says to make yourself pleasing. Was well trained in. And you remember, you know, mentioned last day. She has a thing that she was well brought up. She's very manner. Mannerly. She. She follows her will. She respects her family, all these things. So she's somebody who has a skill knowing how to do the right thing, you know, so agree with them.

Never dominate the conversation. Be economical with the truth. She can get on with people. But all those reasons apply to. This is not her family. This is not, you know, a person from her home environment that she has to somehow, you know, please or be amenable to is a stranger.

So she's kind of released or liberated from that obligation to be pleasing.

So. So she goes on to say, talking about the. And she. To the river that she knows from growing up in Sudan.

The river N. So she says to him, that's superior to the D. I saw your D. It was nothing. Stream. There are two Niles, the blue and the white, named after the colors.

They come from the south, from two different places.

They travel for miles over countries with different names, never knowing they will meet.

I think they get tired of running alone. It's such a long way to the sea. They want to reach the sea so they can rest, stop running.

There's a bridge with two Niles meet. You can see the two. Do you get homesick? Yes. And she felt tired. Now, all this talk, running to rest in the sea. She'd never talked like that before. So here's, you know, she's in a new environment. It's kind of a shock environment in a sense, as I said in the box.

Because suddenly, sense of obligation to behave a certain way to the person she's talking.

This is new. It's new territory. And, you know, so the question is, you know, maybe this is a Moment of empowerment.

She's now free. She's liberated to who she wants to be herself or to say, but mightn't say if she was being constrained.

Rules of politeness or what's appropriate. And so, you know, she has a statement where she says, you know, she had never talked that before.

For. It's kind of a startling moment for her. She realized she's tired. She's kind of exhausted by suddenly speaking her mind and not really what he thinks.

But she's basically saying, you know, you think your river here is great, but it's nothing like the river I know, which is the Nile.

So she's kind of putting him down a bit. Right. But. And she would never do that in her ordinary life or in her home environment.

So she's allowed to do that here. The question is, you know, dialogue. You know, actually thinking about somebody. Not just judging her from the outside, you know, actually having a dialogue with them.

Where you have communication that might produce moments of friction or unease or difficulty.

Can also, in the long run, be a liberation. Because it allows people to express them to be themselves.

And you could say that, you know, dialogue could be transformative.

You know, he now learns something about the Nile.

Which makes him think about his own river a little bit differently.

And also, you know, dialogue might be a way of repairing.

So she realizes, you know, that, you know, he's not a threat.

Just somebody who has a very part of the world. I've seen other things. And this idea of repairing the potential misunderstanding that might be a separation between them is something that dialogue can do.

Dialogue potentially can overcome this. And here's another interesting theme in the story, too, on the.

On the issue of dynamics of migration and integration.

And that's religion. Because the story makes it quite clear that religion is more just as I'm saying this, the last day too, because it rises in the early part of the story.

It's got a spiritual dimension, historical. It's really complex and functions and has quite a lot of power and influence, you know, in.

In particular in this situation. So just read through the section. So she's, again, she's having this, you know, dialogue with Brian.

She's getting to know him. What is your religion? She asked. No, nothing, I suppose. That's terrible. That's really terrible. It was too loud, too concerned. She's also aware of herself. She's wild. Make sure that's part of her machine. Says I must behave myself. Just. Okay, I'm being a bit too forceful here. But she's. She's expressing herself Very kind of spontaneously, in a way that she might have done before.

But she finds it shocking that he says he has no religion.

Any casual way he says it. Nothing, I suppose, as if it's not even important in any way.

His face went red again and he tapped his spoon against the empty mug.

Wave all politeness make him dislike her. Battered, it said, even before his windows got smashed.

But here in the west, they hate Islam. Standing up to go, she said flippantly, why don't you become a Muslim then?

But here she's. And she's comment that, well, they all hate Muslims in the west, they all hate Islam.

So working with that assumption, she's assuming, well, probably Brian does too.

You know, he probably despises me or has some judgment about me as a Muslim.

But, you know. So she asked this question, well, why don't you become a Muslim then?

You know, if you don't have a religion, what about, you know, Islam?

He says. A shrug, her eyes. So she's again being transformed by this encounter.

It blurred his face when he stood up. In the west, they hate Islam. And he. She said, thanks for the coffee and walked away. He followed her. Shadia. Shadia. He pronounced her name wrong, three syllables instead of two.

There's this museum about Africa. I've never been before. If you care to go tomorrow. Tomorrow she may not show up at the museum, even though she said she would.

She should have told Brian that she was engaged to casually.

What did he expect from her? Reduced, abrupt customs. If I read knew about this or if I read his. Her fiance got in cartoon. Her secret guilt was like a hardwood egg stuffed in her chest.

Okay, so, you know, partly this scene is about again her trying to figure out how she feels about Ryan, how she should feel about how she should conduct or continue this developing relationship or not.

And what's playing in her mind are all these things.

It's kind of personal, you know, wonder about the corrupt of what she's saying.

But also religion in this case becomes something important about spiritual beliefs.

You know, they hate Muslims. That becomes. So that's not about what you believe as Muslim or Christian.

That's about. About been divided into the sort of structure, this scheme where one is seen to be the enemy of the other.

So she's aware that by saying that she's Muslim or by bringing up the course of the issue of religion, she's putting herself at risk, you know, of being sort of, you know, attacked by him.

But also it becomes clear that, you know, she. Part of her saying, you know, really this world is too, too difficult and complicated.

Europe has different rules, it's reduced. I don't feel easy here. I'm not sure what's going on. Pushing away again. And then that is a kind of shame or guilt that she's actually potentially interested and maybe even falling in love with Brian.

And that's produces guilt in her because she feels, well, I'm already engaged to Karita at home.

Well, what would he think if he knew what I'm thinking in my heart or my thought about Brian?

And the guilt, again, often associated with religion becomes another dimension.

The religion here again has a sort of set of moral expectation.

So here the various. That's something which has the potential to separate.

Anyway, so Brian has invited to go to the museum. It's a museum about Africa. So presumably he thinks, oh, this will be interesting because she'll.

She'll maybe feel even, you know, more comfortable if she's in a place to remind her of where she comes from.

But she's. She's worried about developing the relation to Brian.

But she does go, okay, and there's this, then this scene in the museum which she'll spend a couple of slides on, which is kind of that scene like, if you remember that, where some sort of some event happens that changes things dramatically.

And this is in story. Okay, so they go into the museum and this tells you what she.

How he responds to the museum. The first thing they saw was a Scottish man from Victorian times.

He sat in a chair surrounded with possessions from Africa, overflowing trunks, an ancient map strewn on the floor of the glass cabinet, gleaming on the wax.

Shaja turned away. There was some ugliness in the lifelike whiskey, his determined back laden with ready to report.

So this is a story, a narrative that she's repelled by.

However, Brian. Brian began to conscientiously study every display pattern, read the posters on the wall.

She followed him around and thought that he was studious, careful and studious.

That's why he did so well in his degree. But she persevered, saying the words to herself, moving her lips.

So she. She follows Brian and read everything in this museum, even though I feel this is so.

She repeats these words. During the 18th and 19th centuries, northeast Scotland made a disproportionate impact on the world at large by contributing so many skilled and committed individuals in serving an empire.

They gave and received, changed others and were themselves changed.

Okay, so this is something that's written in the museum.

It's a kind of example of a. What you might call a Heroic narrative of imperialism.

So here the focus is on Africa or the people of Africa.

This is about those colonialists and explorers and oppressors.

However you want to activity was, well, about them.

It's about the Scottish says so again, she's. She's trying to take up that position, occupy that space that Brian is able to occupy because he's Scottish.

He's reading about these people who are his people, in a sense.

So he can identify with this narrative, this story of an empire that's being told.

It's not so easy. He can try to ventriloquize it, say the words to herself.

But they're her eyes, skimmed objects, iron and copper.

Nothing belonged to her life at home. What she missed here was Europe's vision. The cliches about Africa, cold and old. Okay, so in a way, she. She had been partly expecting and Brian had certainly maybe been hoping for this too, that she would go to Africa, be reminded of poem that she missed.

Right. But instead she displays not just the narratives that are there in the posters, but also the objects on display.

This is nothing to do with. This is not my life. This is no connection to me. These objects relate to her own history in life or even her people.

She comes from one particular place in Africa. Not Africa, that's a huge and very various place with many, many cultures and traditions.

But it's also that these objects are detached. They're just there on display. They're cold and they're old. So the alien to her. This is alien to her in a certain sense, as they are to Brian.

And there's no connection to the culture that these objects come from.

See a picture of a. And she kind of half jokingly says, he looks like you.

Don't you think? She said to Brian. He stood in front of a portrait of a soldier who died in the first year of this century.

And this makes her think about, yeah, he's. He belongs in this world that's being depicted here, and I don't belong here.

And in a photograph, we are nice together. She doesn't belong in a photograph of him where he's this.

In this kind of imperial, you know, pose, if you like.

There would be. So the museum, as it's transpiring, and be together and have a day by each other and come to have some affection for each other.

It's actually proven to do the opposite. It's pushing them apart. And then she sees guns, say a row of guns aiming at her.

They've been waiting to blow her away. Scottish arms of centuries ago. Silver muzzles, now a dirty grave. And she. When. When Brian sees the guns, presumably he thinks of the soldiers and he maybe even would identify with those soldiers who had gone out with guns to Africa and other places.

Part of the British, she sees threat and danger. And the guns are kind of a reminder for her, I think, of the violent battles for, say, the control of Sudan, where she's from, especially in the late 19th century, the height of British imperialism, where the British led armed forces control of Sudan.

And they were at that time battling against a rebellion led by a Muslim leader against British rule and also against Egyptian rule, for that matter.

But any. The complications of empire and the guns that would have been used in a scene, but the idea of those guns for her are guns trained against, you know, rebels.

And in a certain narrative, certainly, you know, perhaps not exactly her narrative, but certainly people in Sudan, those Muslims could be heroes, those Muslim rebels be heroes.

Whereas, you know, the other narrative is on the British side, it's the British soldiers who are the heroes.

So again, people, this museum expecting sunlight, photographs of the Nile, something to appease her homesickness, a comfort, a message.

But the messages were not for her, not for anyone like her.

A letter From West Africa, 1762. An employee to his employer in Scotland. An employee trading European goods for African curiosities.

And she quotes this letter that's on display. It was a great difficulty to understand it being a thing so seldom.

But they've all something and laughed heartily at me and said I was a good man to love their country so much.

Okay, so the reported voice of a colonial trader, you know, repeating back the voices that he claims to be hearing from the native people and doing it, presenting that as a kind of a joke.

And also that he takes. He turns it into an affirmation of his colonial presence, his colonial activity.

Oh, they. They told me they love. They love that I love and whatever I say that, you know, the whole dynamics of colonial dialogue is a very interesting point.

But she picks up on this and she picks up that last phrase.

Love my country so much, huh? She should not be here. There was nothing for her here. She wanted to see minarets, boats, fragile in the Nile, people, people like her father.

Times she had sat in the waiting room of his clinic among pregnant women.

The pain in her heart because she was going to see him in a few minutes.

His room, the air conditioner, the smell of his pipe, his wet coat when she hugged him, he smelled a blistering mouthwash.

That's her. After that, it's Nothing to do with this museum. This museum is an alien and even, you know, threatening and hostile place in some ways for her.

So you have a counterpoint here in this section between the museum's narrative, the museum's colonial discourse on Africa, where Africa is an alien place, it's a place for economic gain, it's a place for imperial control, try to impose imperial control.

And very much a place of us and them, and even a place perhaps of delusions, where the imperialist deludes himself or herself that they're actually doing a favor to these people, that they are now subject to their rule.

That's one narrative. That's the museum's story, in a sense, where Shaja is.

Her Africa is modern. It's not old, it's not historical, it's not objects.

It's about community, it's about family, it's about personal experience.

The smell of Listerine, you know, on her father's breath, and that kind of idea that her Africa is one where Listerine, you know, a global commodity, is part of her world too.

So even the idea of the US and them, of Africa versus Europe has begun to break down or is complicated, even in cartoon.

So her cartoon is nothing like that. It doesn't fit into the story. The end of the story, the two of them, sort of. He's aware that she's not having a good time at this museum and she's trying to process what's been happening.

So he says, shadia, don't cry. He still pronounced her name wrong because she had not shown him how to say it properly.

They're telling you lies in this museum. She said, don't believe them. It's all wrong. It's not jungles and antelopes. It's people. We have things like computers and cars. We have seven up in Africa. And some people, a few people have bathrooms with golden taps.

I should hear with you. You shouldn't taught me. He said museums change. He didn't know. It was a steep path. She had no strength. He didn't understand many things. Years and landscapes, gulfs. If she was strong, she would have explained and not tired of explaining, she would have patiently taught him another language.

Letters, curved like the epsilon and gamma he knew from mathematics, would teach him Arabic.

She would have shown him that words could be read from right to left.

If she was not small in the museum, if she was really strong, she would have made his trip to Mecca real.

Not only in the book, reference to never been to Mecca.

But he read about it in the book and had deserved to go there.

Now, this is the actual end of the story. The question here, and I'll come back to this, this is, you know, if you think about Todorov's narrative narratology, Todorov says, you know, every story comes to a conclusion which is sort of restoration of equilibrium, peace on new terms.

And getting there, some sort of resolution happens to the conflicts that have been described.

The question for this is to think about, you know, does this story resolve its conflicts?

It's multiple conflicts between these two individuals, cultural differences, religious differences, you know, differences of taxation, managed to resolve these things.

Now, you know, you might say in the first instance, no, because in the end, Shaja is feeling, you know, not connected to Brian.

It seems to end with a separation between. On the other hand, at the end of the story, maybe there is some potential for.

For some kind of resolution or dialogue or integration between them in a sense that, you know, Brian by saying, you know, museums change.

I can change, however difficult. And I think Shaman's point is that we. Extremely difficult. She doesn't have energy or to try to take on that huge amount of task trying to really get them to understand where she's tell me, you know, museums change.

I can change. He recognizes that there's a possibility and at least a desire for future change.

And the fact is that Al Shadya, she's exhausted at this.

She's stopped exhausted even with the prospect of trying to really do the hard work that it will take to explain, you know, where she comes from and really try to.

To. To build bridges between the two of them. At the same time, she herself in the story has undergone a personal growth.

You know, that earlier passage that I quoted, where she begins to be able to say things, be able to speak.

Her mind does it here with bribe. So she's honest in a way that you could say. Maybe there were ways in which she wasn't always honest because you're trying to be, you know, the appropriate person to behave in the right way.

So maybe she has experienced personal growth. So we even know she's not recognizing it. The story is telling us that something has changed.

So maybe it's not completely hopeless or depressing ending.

A couple of things to say as well. I mean, part of this is about personal stories and personal relationships, but it's also about this more general point of reading the signs.

You say, you know, narratives would be misinterpreted.

I heard it speak. Brian thinks he knows, thinks he does. So he doesn't have a skill and the knowledge to really understand a Lack of respect and knowledge, maybe sort of unconscious arrogance that sometimes interferes with, you know, relationships.

For instance, Brian mispronouncing Shaj's name.

Even though she admits that partly her thing, that she hasn't insisted on teaching him how to say properly.

So she takes it on herself too. But again, it's a sign of the labor she has to do. He wouldn't just ask her exactly how do you say her name?

You'll mispronounce it until she tells him otherwise.

And then there's a kind of fear and emotion interpretation, the signs, the trying to culture.

And in the figure. The last point here is a bigger one about, you know, reading the science too and reading history.

The museum is a place which tells a story and as well as dissertation.

That can happen at a personal, individual, one to one level, which is kind of.

There's also the issue of misinterpretation of cross cultures.

And the museum certain bodies out in a way and institutional or historical narratives may have multiple or contradictory means.

And this can be a problem. I put up this quote from this great 20th century Walter Benny, German intellectual who died in 1940 on the run from the Nazis, Jewish.

But he has some wonderful kind of analyses and thinking about the theories of history.

There's one phrase, phrase which sticks and is very useful to think about.

He said that every document of civilization is also a record of barbarism.

Now think about that in relation to the story. Every document that the British Empire would say and people contribution to the British Empire in that museum.

However, for those who were colonized, it may be the same act.

The same set of events have two different meanings depending on how you live it, right?

And that is because you think you got the right meeting or you're celebrating.

Look at. There may be another side to this, even the disturbing side that you don't want to see.

I think that's partly illustrated by this. And I just wanted to kind of move towards an end here with thinking about the museum.

Again, this is decolonizing the museum, which is how you narrativize history, how you tell the story of history.

How do you capture it in a museum which is meant to be a place where you can learn about history?

How do you capture the complications that I've just been outlining?

The fact is, you know, museums are not just passive repositories of objects.

They are that one sense. They're collections of things. But more importantly, they're controllers of memory.

They decide what is going to be remembered and what isn't going to Be remembered.

And how sometimes I put these in quotation marks, sometimes used to talk about museums, depending on their politics.

Museums were actually, by telling people in the imperial countries that they were doing a good thing.

So they become part of, if you like, the weaponry of them, or you might take it more neutrally.

Museums are sites of knowledge production, and that's an important phrase to think about.

It means they're not just sites of things and objects lying in cases, sites of activity.

Knowledge is produced by museums. So they have a really important function and a responsibility.

Therefore, what kind of knowledge are they producing?

Is it the truth or is it not the truth? Or is it, you know, are they telling the full complexity of a story?

And then there's another issue which is kind of related to the story.

Museums sometimes contacts between cultures, contacts between people and other cultures, people and objects.

They're places where encounters happen. And his story kind of illustrates that. What happens when Brian, the Scottish boy and Shadja, you know, the girl from Sudan, visiting student, go to this museum?

What kind of contact happens? Is it productive place be a place where contact for all inevitably has friction, sometimes conflict, but that doesn't produce progress.

And that leads us to decolonization. Decolonization as an idea or an activity, typically economic process.

It's also as cultural, educational level. You talk about decolonizing museum or decolonizing the curriculum.

You know, the idea that even the curriculum of, say, English or history as it was taught maybe a couple generations ago and even more recently is dominated by the voices of those who are, if you like, from the imperial cultures.

Given that English is such a global language, why are there not more voices from other parts of the world or colonies or former colonies at the moment?

You know, sometimes very, very vociferous. But in terms of museums, you know, here's a quote from.

You know, the question has been what to do about this situation as museum or how we deal with it.

National Museum of Scotland has been accused of ignoring the violent parts of Scot Scotland's history with a display that appears to craze Scottish colonial officers.

This is a headline from 2018 talking about the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, making exacts that the latest story was making.

You know, even though it's written before this. The question about whose story is being told by is it the Reichster?

And that's something even comes a bit closer to home here.

The University of Aberdeen, as it happens, where the story is set, did have collections that decided decolonize and stop telling the story, which is about the appropriation of objects and a celebration of, you know, the imperialists who went to places and brought things back, brought treasure back, if you like, is to send it is to, you know, send stuff back to where it came from.

So university repatriated some of his artifacts to Canada, to the cultures where the objects came from.

And it's even happened here in this university. In 1852, a British officer who'd served in Canada brought back a big canoe made by an indigenous tribe, the Maliseet First Nation Canada.

And it's not openly quad here in the university for, you know, 150 odd years, just hanging up there as a sort of relic of empire in a way.

And in 2014 it was taken down and as you can see, taken out of the quad and actually set back to helicopter people, the first nations of Canada, as a gesture towards recognizing that, you know, empire shapes so many things in the sort of unthinking idea that you can just take what you from wherever you go.

How do we repair them? Maybe by decolonizing. And then more dramatically here internally, I'm aware that Trinity College just two years ago repatriated 13 skulls that academics from Trinity College Dublin had taken from the graveyard in the island off the coast here.

Because at that time, you know, the islanders were considered to be kind of like these native aboriginal people.

And people went out, including Irish, you know, academics from Dublin went to measure their skulls and try to figure out were they like other humans and so on, and actually took some of the skulls down the graveyard to bring back to Trinity College to study as museum pieces.

So it's not just about far away. It can happen even closer to home. Of course, then there was a to repatriate them in 2022.

So they have now been returned to the great and reinterred in en with the family members that they came from, basically.

So decolonizing. The museum is kind of about, say, kind of rethinking the theme.

The terms in which the heroes who are the victims, the migrant seem to be a European and the native being in Africa, that's being an African, that's the, the story or the narrative in this museum in Aberdeen is like Shaja Byron, Brian's relationship where she's African and he's the native, he's European.

And the fact that the story sets this parallel in a way is interesting because it shows the, what you could call the asymmetry of power, the unbalance of power.

You know, when Europeans are migrants, they're considered to be heroic and they're when Students, they're vulnerable, they're disempowered and can experience being disempowered so that this relationship, again, the opposition between the migrants and the native get reversed because of history, because of the context.

So the story draws attention to these things, you know, to be.

To imagine how our lives and our experiences and our thoughts and our values even are shaped by how we're positioned within instructors of power.

And you know, in this museum, there's. There's a poster which says, in serving an empire, this is part of the rhetoric that's so disturbing.

They intercede changed others and were themselves changed.

This is about the colonial, supposedly. But what would happen if the museum had a narrative change which encompassed the colonized people also, what happened to them?

A very dramatic change, a different story. So partly the column is about telling those stories, telling multiple stories and a deconstruction of stereotypes.

And in this, you know, the question, can a museum be a site of challenge to power, application of existing power?

Do museums always have to just tell the stories of the powerful?

Or can they be sites of new kinds of knowledge production where you challenge with different stories, challenge those narratives?

There's an essay which you can access through the library here.

And these slides are up on canvas, so you don't need to write all this down.

An essay by Anupama Arora, decolonizing Museum about this story, about this particular issue.

Decolonization with innovation for story. So if you're interested in the theme, you might want to have a look at that.

And here's a quote from the famous Turkish novelist Orhan Hamuk, Nobel Prize winner who.

Who see online about museums too. He argues that measure of a museum's success should not be its ability to represent a state, a nation or a company and their heroic narratives they tell or a particular history.

It should be its capacity to reveal. The humanities of Richard of. Of individuals focus on individual lives and their experiences, which don't necessarily always fit into the official heroic narrative of the museum.

So finally, a couple of takeaways about the story.

The story begins and ends. And so in this way, because we see it as a story that touches on.

It's clearly an illustration of the fact that the personal is political.

We can't get away from it. Historical narratives, for example, the museum's narrative vampire, economic connection to individual lives and emotions, they're not just static records.

The historical stories we tell, they matter. And we have to pay attention to them and we have to sometimes ask questions about them.

And one of the big questions is who Writes history anyway, who tells us what we should think about where we come from or what happened in the past?

Who controls information or disinformation as it controls power?

Who has the power to name, to represent common sense, to create official versions, to represent the social hero, represent the past, and then who has the right official?

These are all questions the story, I think, raises finally, you know, the message.

Okay, well, we've already seen that, you know, Shadja talks about the exhausting and difficult work that she would have to do to really make Brian understand where she comes from.

And perhaps that exhausting, difficult work of cultural respect and repair can't be accomplished just at the level of the individual.

It's too hard for individuals to take on the challenges sometimes that this kind of, you know, work.

So we do need institutional and political responsibilities.

We need museums to tell different stories. It's not just about us as individuals trying to make our points and trying to work things out at an individual level.

We need more than that. There's going to be change. And then finally, how can fiction contribute to understanding of political issues?

Well, can some narratives, be they stories or be museums, validate rather than suppress cultural diversity?

Maybe with new narratives? Can we imagine where. Situation where one story doesn't have to mean the silencing of a different story, an oppositional story to try to ref, like, you know, multiple sides or experiences.

And then finally the reading experience for you, the reader, Right.

Think about the story. You know, do you. Do you more with Shaja or do you identify with Brian stories because they ask you to identify with characters?

Can fiction help us to transcend the limitations of gender, class, cultural formations?

We bring that reading experience by reading about others, sometimes things that are very different or challenging to us.

Does that help us begin to work at that sort of idea of dialogue and cultural repair?

So fiction that we have to go on. Okay, so finally, just to say, starting tomorrow, you'll have the next five lectures with Professor.

Notes

Thematic Insights on Migration and Integration

Major Themes

Dynamics of migration and integration are a key focus in the narrative.
The personal experience of individuals, particularly migrants, with integration versus non-integration.

Key Characters and Their Experiences

Characters illustrate various aspects of being migrants:
- Shaja: Struggles with her identity and the feeling of belonging.
- Badr: Represents the collective struggle of overseas students facing hostility.
- Brian: An outsider whose relationship with Shaja complicates her feelings about integration.

Issues Highlighted in the Narrative

Violence and Hostility: The narrative hints at the threat of violence faced by migrants, as illustrated by Badr's windows being smashed.
Conflicting Narratives: The discrepancy between the glorified image of Scotland presented in brochures and the actual experiences of migrants.
Self-Doubt and Mistakes: Shaja's internal conflict regarding her actions and her integration process, reflecting the uncertainty many migrants feel.
Group Dynamics: The tension within the migrant community, where suspicion can impede personal relationships.
Misreading Signs: The difficulty in interpreting social cues and the fear of misinterpretation that complicates integration efforts.

The Role of the Museum

The museum serves as a metaphor for institutional narratives that affect personal relationships:
- It highlights the colonial past and its impact on present identities.
- Shaja's disconnection from museum representations of Africa illustrates broader issues of cultural erasure and identity.
The interaction in the museum further underscores the barriers between Brian and Shaja, showing how cultural narratives create distance rather than connection.

Dialogue as a Transformative Element

Dialogue between characters not only reveals personal truths but also carries the potential for deeper understanding and connection:
- Shaja’s spontaneous conversations with Brian illustrate her struggles with cultural expectations and her desire for authenticity.
- Religion emerges as a boundary, reflecting societal prejudices and personal identity.

Institutional Responsibility

The narrative underscores the need for museums and educational institutions to engage in the decolonization process:
- Museums as sites of knowledge production need to consider whose stories are being told and acknowledge diverse experiences.
The idea that integrating various narratives in museums can foster understanding and respect among different cultures.

Conclusion and Reflection

The story concludes without a clear resolution, reflecting the ongoing challenges of integration and cultural understanding.
There is an implication that individual efforts must be supported by institutional change to foster better integration journeys for migrants.