To everything - turn, turn, turn - there is a season..

Life this past week has been quite hectic. I’ve had to fill out a lot of paperwork and attend many rendez-vous at my excellent new physical therapy practice. Since I’ll be at HomeBase for awhile, I’ve also started reconnecting with college friends and researching prospective graduate programs while I have Internet. A few days a week, my mother and I take a turn about the local park for exercise and conversation. Furthermore, my bed presents too many temptations of sleep and reality TV for me to do any work there. Thus, I decamp to the kitchen island or the deck in order to draft these bloggy delights. Gazing out into my backyard or observing squirrels in the park’s pine trees, I’ve noticed signs that winter doth approach. The leaves are changing color, the rabbits are becoming bolder in their search for food and the shorts/flip flop combination I’ve been wearing is no longer sufficient to stave off chilly breezes. Growing up in the Midwest, I usually experience a few seasons every day and didn’t think much about the different climes presented in my schoolbooks. Having survived a tour de force European winter and more than a few blistering hot days in Africa, I can now better understand the importance of seasons in literature and film. Not only do places like South Africa have the opposite pattern of seasons from the US (spring starts in early September), but places like Host Country have an entirely different alternation of seasons (rainy season, hot season, not-too-hot-or-rainy season). In Western literature, autumn usually symbolizes decay, abundant harvest or some combination thereof (cf Keats, To Autumn). What if your home doesn’t have an autumn? One of the challenges for postcolonial nations is translating Northern Hemisphere experiences such as skiing to their own cultural realities. Mentions of senses that are supposed to remind us of shared experiences (a brisk autumn breeze, songbirds singing amongst melting snow) instead inspire exclusion. The phenomenon works both ways – I didn’t understand why so many peoples of the world took siestas until I lived in a subtropical climate for four months. But there was a key difference. As an American, I had access to a rich (in terms of sheer quantity and in cultural capital) literature relating experiences similar to my own. Works from their own cultures do exist, but they often aren’t widely distributed and are predominately written in world (colonial) languages. Things are starting to look up as more authors from the Global South are published and postcolonial studies gains more respect as an intellectual field of inquiry. Until then, Host Country pupils will still grow up surrounded by literature that speaks of falling autumn leaves and princesses with peau blanche comme neige (skin as white as snow).