Experiments in the "Land of Experiment"

-By Kamalraj Sigdel

 

Had it not been the case that haunts more than 500,000 Nepalese, EDV would not have been the subject matter of our concern. Here, we should be aware of the "American thirst for experiments" that is haunting repeatedly and we are being blindly experimented. Why are we bringing into the diasporic pain of self-imposed exile? Besides, who could guarantee that the migrants awarded with a diversity visa would not be hurled back if the experiment fails or if it fails to meet their "expectation"?

 

If the American experiment at present is seemingly heading towards diversity and multiculturalism, some 200 years ago America was headstrong with her quite opposite experiment. When America was not able to settle peaceful communities where both Whites and the Indians had to co-exist. And when there was violence and conflict between the White Americans and the Indian Americans, one of such experiments was imagined and practices. In such a situation of enmity between two races, "mixing of blood" was thought to be the best solution. This experiment was opposite to the norm of the present EDV experiment.

 

I am here referring to the "blending-into-one" strategy of the early 1800s practiced in America. Then was a time when intermarriage between Whites and Indians were advocated as a means of achieving "bloodless" conquest one that could be arrived at not by spilling of blood, but by mixing of it. Some two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson, had once said: "In truth, the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlement and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix and to become one people …. and it will be better to promote than retard it."

 

But Jefferson's Utopia of "blending" had to wait no more than half a century to see what consequence had it brought.  By the middle of the 1800s the "blending" strategy began to deteriorate as reports came in that the resultant "mixed blood" had failed to live up to "white expectations". Mixed bloods quickly became marked as "faulty stock". They turned out to be a product who belong to nowhere. Since then, the "mixed bloods" are facing the dreadful "existential crisis". It was, after all, an "experiment". An experiment can have any result. Furthermore, the "mixed blood" had to suffer from the American ethnocentrism. I wonder, if Americans could ever be multiculturalist or postmodernist leaving their ethnocentricisms at history. The fault, then, was of "white expectation". President Jefferson and the other supporters of the "blending-into-one" strategy were aiming at "homogenization" not at "harmonization". The faulty "white expectation" was therefore of creating a single homogeneous white culture; what Edward Said even today perceives as the "xenophobic fantasy of creating pure European identity".

 

Now, there should not be any "white expectation" if America believes in multiculturalism. But the important thing the EDV hunters should remember is to try to visualize the pain as endured by Allan Ginsberg to "Howl" at America as "square" and strive for "counterculture". Lessons should be learned from history.

 

It should be remembered that, after all, it is another experiment. No one could guarantee that this may not meet the same fate of Jeffersonian failure-strategy. It is in the sense that we are still not able to be sure of its good results. For the paradoxes that underlay this (un)postmodern American action are much more complex. Better is not to go blind to believe that America is going to embrace the EDV "winners" with the warm and large physical embrace of Walt Whitman. Here, the Bush administration is simply practicing some new experiments.

 

Unfortunately, being much gullible and ignorant, we seem to be mere puppets in the hand of a great Experimenter. We wait for our strings to be pulled and we wait for lotteries to bring changes in our life. In what condition will Nepal be left when all of the youths and intellectuals get themselves blinded and deaf to the appeals of the nation and go to America or Europe? Think of it. We are simply swayed by mere experiments. Where is our individuality? Let us not be swayed more by any other experiments for America may keep on doing experiments (with us) since it is the "Land of Experiment" by birth. 

[Date June 2004]